121.5 shutoff, 1 year later: ELT missions up, down, same?

[JoeTomasone]

So now that we've passed the one year mark of no 121.5 detection, I'd be interested to know what effect this has had on your ELT mission workload.  Are you seeing fewer, more, or the same amount of missions?   Are you getting a lot of 121.5 missions from pireps or other sources?   Are you getting a lot of 406 missions? 

[Eclipse]

About the same with some PLB's in the mix.

[isuhawkeye]

do we have any numbers to validate that

[RADIOMAN015]

My understanding is that CAP wide CY 2009 versus 2008, these missions decreased about 40%.  Same period of time our wing's workload decreased by about 25%.   For our wing this year, so far there's been 3 missions, & 1 was a marine related ERIPB.
RM   

[Eclipse]

do we have any numbers to validate that

Nothing official, but I just went through the alert messages for 2010, and we've had 7 ELT missions since 1 Jan, which is about par for
my wing, which generally had 1 or two per month before.

We've also had 2 missing persons activations and assisted the NTSB with debris recovery at a crash site.

[isuhawkeye]

good to hear

[coudano]

We had a small rash of ELT missions right after the shutoff, and then none for the rest of the year.

[Jerry Jacobs]

I don't know about other wings, but it seems that whenever I go on one UDF mission, it easily turns into two or three missions.

[sardak]

Our wing ELT stats:

           Jan    Feb    Year
2008      2       5        64
2009      8       2        29
2010      3       1

Mike

[RiverAux]

Pretty big drop-off in my wing, and we didn't have all that many ELT missions before the switch. 

[IceNine]

do we have any numbers to validate that

Nothing official, but I just went through the alert messages for 2010, and we've had 7 ELT missions since 1 Jan, which is about par for
my wing, which generally had 1 or two per month before.

We've also had 2 missing persons activations and assisted the NTSB with debris recovery at a crash site.

Finds are down substantially though, there has only been 1? find out of the 7 ELT's so far. 

According to my log book I'm at about 65% find rate if I remove this year's poor numbers.

[CAPSGT]

We have seen a massive drop in ELT missions.

FY07: 42
FY08: 39
FY09: 23
FY10: 1

[CAP Marine]

This is my first full year in CAP so I don't have benefit of putting it in year over year perspective for you, but I have found 4 ELT's this year. 3 out of the last 4 training exercises I have attended have evolved into real world ELT mission assignments. Yep- 4 ELT's in 3 missions ('cause I know somebody was doing the math just now!). All were called in or reported by either other A/C in the area or FBO personnel, no 406 hits, and all appeared to be malfunctioning due to hopelessly expired batteries.

[Seabee219]

 Where I am is about the same a big fat ZERO     We do not have many out here anyway in OL Havasu AZ.

[Fubar]

Where I am is about the same a big fat ZERO     We do not have many out here anyway in OL Havasu AZ.

I saw in the news that AZ just had a save last week:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/03/18/Pilot-trapped-for-8-hours-before-rescue/UPI-14061268933665/

[Seabee219]

I am in Lake Havasu, we do not get much up here, we did have a mission to fly over a town due to a storm, it was given to a unit close to phoenix.  But yes AZ got a save, they did a good job  :clap:

[Check Pilot/Tow Pilot]

Canifornia is down as well, but the Bay Area and I had a busy March...

2 UDF non-distress, 1 aircrew non-distress, 1 wave-off for a UDF non-distress, and 1 wave-off for an aircrew non-distress.

Freakish weather to blame.

[ammotrucker]

Joe how are things in Iraq.  I don't know about the other Wings but here is what I have from FLWG.
           
In 2008 we conducted 294 ELT searches 2 PLB and 9 missing aircraft
in 2009 we conducted 137 ELT searches 0 PLB   1 missing person and 6 missing aircraft
for the first three months of 2010 there have been 21 ELT searches

To me we are conducted ELT searches at a rate of 46% of the pre shutoff time frame.

[Eclipse]

In order to truly discuss the numbers, we'd need to know whether GA flying is down/up or static as well because of the economy - less flying means less missions, but not necessarily for reasons related to the satellites not listening on 121.5 anymore.

[CAP Marine]

All-

I considered starting a new topic but thought the original thread/ question was still pertinent. Over the July 4th weekend TX WG had 7 ELT missions, several in the Houston area. Some were 121.5 reported by passing pilots, and a couple were 406's through AFRCC. I personally spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday on CAP duty either in the field or in mission base and couldn't help but to think that the sheer number of active beacons was rather odd.

The alerting officer (IC) reported that the AFRCC said that there were about 50 active ELT's this weekend. Did anybody else see a dramatic uptick in their locations across the US?