Why Cheapskate Pilots Don't Like 406 ELTs

you know in my a lot of years fooling around with airplanes i found one constant in aviation and that's just about everybody in it is a cheap pilot bastard i'm a cheap pilot bastard myself and not ashamed of it so that's why i'm in kind of a foul mood this morning because i'm doing my biennial no not my flight review my 24 month changing of the batteries in this old 121.5 megahertz elt that's an emergency locator transmitter in case you're not familiar these batteries by the way are nothing but six duracell double a's potted up in a tough little plastic tray 43 bucks for the pack in the civilian world 43 bucks will buy what 50 double a's that's a year's supply and then some and because i'm a cheap pilot bastard it's killing me to replace these batteries i tested them with a volt meter so i know they're still good but good or not the manufacturer says you have to replace them every 24 months sure would be good to pry these things out of here and get some reuse out of those good batteries anyway the regulation also says it's legal to test an elt only in the first five minutes of the hour and it looks like we're coming up on that right now radio is tuned to guard 121.5 and now comes the 1500 switch flip and that girl's is music to the ears of a cheap pilot bastard and why is that so well it means i don't have to spend fifteen hundred dollars to put an elt into this 82 year old piper cub now why would i have to do that anyway it's an old as short story that starts in 1972 when a louisiana congressman named hale boggs disappeared in a cessna 310 on a flight in alaska along with another congressman named nick begich a 39-day search turned up not a trace of either one boggs being a high-powered politician in all congress thought it an outrage that a crash could happen without anyone being able to find it so in 1973 by act of congress we got what eventually became cfr 91207 which requires elts and airplanes but not necessarily all airplanes there's a list of exceptions that includes surprisingly airliners but not airplanes like my old cub here for almost 50 years now this regulation has persisted despite the fact that a everyone hated it and b cheap pilot bastards like me really hated it and elts never work very well anyway early in my flying career i thought if i crashed in the woods somewhere i could be like some kind of aeronautical grizzly adams heroically sustaining my passengers on soup made of tree bark until rescue forces arrived but the reality is a lot grimmer than that early research on elts found that if they worked in one out of three crashes you were doing good all kinds of things went wrong the g-switch that's supposed to fire them failed the antennas broke off or got buried in the dirt or the transmitter was smashed to bits in the crash or if it did go off nobody heard it or if it did go off accidentally everybody heard it wasting the civil air patrol's time and finding and silencing it after 10 years of that the better idea came along in 1983 when noah put up the first 406 megahertz satellite now we're talking sort of 406 monitoring listens for a digital signal that can identify an airplane the n number and the owner so fast forward to 2020 and the cost pass sarsat satellite system is supported by 46 countries and 55 satellites these things whiz overhead about every few minutes in some form or another if you squirt a 406 signal into space someone's going to hear it and within minutes the air force's rescue coordination center at tyndall air force base in florida and the coast guard are absolutely heroic in their efforts to track these things down and so is a civil air patrol so problem solved right well not exactly first is the not so small issue of false alarms a lot of false alarms according to noah's data just for 2019 alone there are 11 558 elt activations but only 167 of those were actual distress situations meaning more than 98 percent are false alarms and it's not just elts ships and boats have epirbs hikers have plbs or personal locator beacons and then add to these to the mix and there were more than 19 000 406 alerts last year more than 50 a day 24 7. now to be accurate more than half of these alerts are just single pulses that don't recur maybe the odd blip from someone fooling around with a beacon but aircraft elts are by far the biggest part of the false alert issue u.s law requires you to register 406 beacons and currently there are about 123 thousand 406 elts out there on a false alert per registered beacon basis elts are four times more likely to false alert than a marine epirb and 13 times more likely than a portable plb so what the heck is going on here well one reason is that elts live in a more dynamic environment than either boats or hikers encounter putting a sharp eye on the data shows that elts have more than 14 times the false alert rate due to just beacon mishandling than either epirbs or plbs that's because boats bounce around in heavy seas but they don't smash into runways and fight the hard landings airplanes do that a lot also elts get removed or jarred during maintenance which also sets them off without anybody realizing it if you're doing this right you will have properly registered your elt or plb so in case of a false alert those hard-working guys at the air force rescue center will clear it up with a single phone call it's very common to buy a used airplane and forget to register the new owner's name and contact information if you haven't registered they have to chase you down and that's just tacky so check the website for current registration and if you haven't done it bring it up today this is the website okay so the space portion of the sarsat network is a fabulous piece of technology it's as miraculous as gps but the ground air and sea side of the deal maybe not so much there are 123 000 plus aircraft elts out there but with almost 200 000 airplanes in the ga fleet that means maybe as many as 80 000 airplanes are flown by sheep ambassadors like me and we're still sporting these ancient 121.5 megahertz elts the fcc would like to break our fingers in 2013 they tried to flat out outlaw 121 5 elts but the cheap pilot bastards have an association otherwise known as aopa and they said not so fast and actually so did the faa both said the juice just wasn't worth squeezing so as much as the scc would like us all to convert to 406 elts 121.5 elts are still legal to use but you can't install a new one and nobody will fix them and since 2009 they haven't been monitored from space so is anybody listening well let's see comp check on guard piper 726 calm check on guar piper 726 any station well actually the faa still listens at air traffic control facilities and so do many pilots on a second radio it just so happens that none appear to be flying around here today so maybe try to schedule your crash on a day when someone is tuned in on the guard frequency you might get lucky and while i'm at it if you're one of those children who finds it amusing to meow on the guard frequency stop doing that now on to the second half of our story which has to do with 406 elt efficacy in other words what are these things supposed to do and how well do they do it for that you have to dig into the ntsb's accident database elts are supposed to do one thing and one thing only locate the crash site there's no question 406 elts do that better than 121 5 elts ever did when they work like they're supposed to but that's not the same as saying they work well i looked into a pile of accident data five years worth of crashes between 2013 and 2017 and an additional detailed analysis of 100 accidents in 2017 plus another 75 in 2016. this analysis is complicated by the fact that the ntsb doesn't do a consistent job with these accident reports in many accident reports the ntsb doesn't say what kind of elt was involved doesn't say whether it activated or if it aided in the crash location so let's zoom in on 2016 because it's a representative year i bias the analysis mostly for the kind of accidents elts are designed for that is crashes in remote areas or at least away from airports because when you think about it if you biff the landing and skid tail first into the fbo lobby they're not really going to need an elt to fine you in 2016 there were 117 ga accidents in the u.s and 179 involved fatalities that's about 16 percent and that's fairly typical year to year looking at 50 of those accidents in detail elts helped find the wreck in 18 call that one in five in just over half the elt didn't activate at all whether it was a 121.5 or a 406. that's actually a little better than the historical average the fact that 40 of these elts were legacy 121.5 models leads me to believe that there are actually a lot more of them out there flying than the registration numbers might suggest in all of the accidents i reviewed 256 total about 15 percent were 406 elts given the small numbers it's kind of hard to pin down specifics in the 2016 data there were nine crashes involving 406 elts but seven of those failed to activate but in 2017 four of the six 406 elts did function as they were supposed to but only one of those aided in finding the crash in fatal accidents where the crash forces are usually high elts aided in finding the crash sites in under 20 percent the reason for that should be obvious from these photos if the crash is violent enough to kill the occupants it's likely to kill the elt too what field data is available and that's not much suggests that 406 elts don't survive crashes any better than 121.5 types do but nasa performed some simulated test crashes on elt survivability and published a report in 2017. it found that the newer beacons themselves were actually quite robust but they still fail for the same old reasons they always have severed antenna connections crash sensing and mounting issues but even in some violent crashes the elt might still function like this one but it didn't help locate the crash one person survived after a night in the woods but 406 elts really shine in one regard when they work correctly location happens fast and if the elt is equipped to accept continuous gps position from the avionics which some are it can happen in mere minutes a study done by embry riddle found that gps assisted 406 elts reduced search time from 11 hours to just two hours i found two crashes in alaska where rescue forces arrived in under an hour however what i did not find many examples of is what we all worry about crashing and being trapped in the wreckage with no hope of rescue other than a working elt if this happens it doesn't happen very often and it doesn't appear in the accident files noaa's website tracks beacon activations and incidents and while the little airplane symbols on this map indicate a rescue the reality is the airplanes are often found by other means or lives weren't in danger in the first place this incident may be an example of a life-saving rescue but notice that it's literally buried in hundreds of plb alerts these are lost or injured hikers campers and outdoors people so if you're like me and you don't really want to spend a thousand to 1500 bucks for a 406 elt and you're nursing along an old 121.5 elt are you taking a risk well maybe a little but probably not look at it this way elts locate the crash in not better than half of the accidents and historically it's been a lot less than that even in crashes away from airports so think about that if you have a piece of safety equipment that performs one in three times would you be impressed that it's a good investment personally i'm going to go with no but i have to say i would make one exception and that's if i flew a lot in alaska or the mountain west where the addition of a 406 elt might give you a little bit of an edge on being rescued more quickly but there's a cheaper and better solution a 406 personal locator beacon you can buy a good one for 300 bucks if you survive the crash turn it on and you'll be found as quickly as you would with an elt and if you don't survive well i guess you won't need it you can also use it for hiking biking fishing and boating which you can't do with your expensive elt and it's a very unlikely to false alarm because it takes a deliberate series of actions to activate it one last thing the civil air patrol told me that they're missing aircraft searches rely far less on elts now than on cell phone tracking and adsb data you're now required to have adsb for most u.s airspace and c.a.p stays that data for at least a couple of weeks so they can call it up and conduct a search to see where you've been and where you disappeared combined with cell phone data it's more reliable than an elt and if you're really paranoid about getting lost in the woods get a spot or spider track satellite tracker or maybe even a garmin inreach iridium communicator these things will get you found quicker than anything because it's your friends and relatives who will be doing the looking given the history of elts they were never really a good idea as i said the aviation environment is just too dynamic for them to work much better than one in three times they're no longer the only way or even the best way to find a crash site i'm paul bertarelli reporting for abweb thanks for watching now this cheap pilot bastard is going to put an elt with fresh batteries back into this old cub [Music] you

Channel: AVweb

Views: 141,762

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Id: d1YjGLwfYSQ

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020