Cell phones and missing airplane SAR

[RiverAux]

Did anyone notice that signals received from cell phones that weren't actually being used factored into the recent search for the Kim family and the climbers on Mount Hood?

I see this as another potential source of information to use during missing airplane searches.  If the cell phone was on, and it was the right sort of cell phone, when the plane crashed and the phone survived, it may still transmit a signal that the cell phone company could pick up and CAP could use that to narrow down the search area. 

I sure hope somebody from NHQ is reading this and can get out a quick information sheet on how CAP ICs could access this information during a search. 

[Eclipse]

I sure hope somebody from NHQ is reading this and can get out a quick information sheet on how CAP ICs could access this information during a search. 

And how would work, exactly?

[RiverAux]

What I meant was that someone at national needs to research exactly which companies have cell phones with this capability and who CAP would need to call if there was a search and we determined that someone on board had a cell phone from that company, so that we could have that company try to determine if they could locate the phone.  Find the phone, maybe find the plane.

[fyrfitrmedic]

 IIRC, information from Sprint was used in a missing-aircraft search several years ago. A helicopter went missing en route from Harrisburg PA to Bristol TN and was found near the top of a ridge in the George Washington National Forest.

This was the same search where declassified NTAP info from one of those 'national security assets' was made available.

[thefischNX01]

I did a mission back in May which hinged on a cell phone call.  I was not privy to all the information, but we were able to call the company and find which tower had been activated for the call, and which side of the tower had been activated too.  This narrowed down our search area to a few square miles.  The trees in the area were full and the canopy was impenetrable from the air, so we had to use ground teams, but were able to find him. 

[DNall]

"Maam does your husband have a cell phone? Can you give us the number & company it's with please? T/Y. AFRCC, hi it's me again, standby to copy... Can you call that comany & see if they have anything on this & aks if they can monitor till we close out. T/Y Sgt, let me know."

Why you guys gotta make things hard?

[RiverAux]

Will the cell phone company release this information to the AFRCC?  I imagine there are potential legal issues here, both from the AF side and the company side.  The company may require some sort of signed statement from the family to release the information to outside parties, etc.  Keep in mind that this isn't all that different than tapping a phone, even if for totally benign purposes.  So, it may be as simple as you say on the CAP side of the house, but are the procedures in place to make this happen as fast as possible on the AF side of the house?

[DNall]

AFRCC I believe ran all the searches cited in this thread, yeah I think they have it down. I don't know what legal implications there would be, but as AF is Posse Comitatus restricted & because no conversation can be heard at any point nor even an exact position... I can't see it as being that big a deal. If we need fam permission, I'm sure the controller will tell me that & I can turn around & ask the wife to sign a note for faxing/email. Why in the world would anyone do somethign for NOC or an IC that they wouldn't for AFRCC. Those guys at RCC are pretty bright & hard working. Use your resources & task them with things while you focus on your search effort. They have a lot more resources to bring to bear on problems than you do.

[RiverAux]

I suppose that part of what I'm getting at is that if this is a viable search tool, why hasn't CAP made some effort to let ICs know that it is available to them? 

[arajca]

It is very different from tapping a phone. You're not trying to find out what someone is talking about, just a location of the phone. Given that cell phones are required to include their location  when calling 911 now, using cell towers to determine the location of the phone in a SAR situation shouldn't be a problem.

[RiverAux]

I didn't say it was tapping the phone, just that it brings up some of the very same issues.  A cell phone company is just not going to release this information to random people who call them on the phone saying they're the AFRCC and want to know where a cell phone is at.  That company has to protect themselves and ensure that this is a legitimate request and that the can release the info without getting into any legal trouble of their own. 

[lordmonar]

What I meant was that someone at national needs to research exactly which companies have cell phones with this capability and who CAP would need to call if there was a search and we determined that someone on board had a cell phone from that company, so that we could have that company try to determine if they could locate the phone.  Find the phone, maybe find the plane.

National Security Agency

[bosshawk]

Corrrect me if I am wrong, but I believe that if a cell phone is turned on, it tries to make contact with a tower: I believe that shows on the face of your phone as a number of bars, denoting level of service.  I am sure that a company, whomever it is, would not deny telling a SAR agency which tower was the one contacted by the phone.

Don't go too far down the road to asking the National Security Agency for help: those folks are really paranoid about their operations and capabilities and would need to have an official contact from the Air Force before they would even talk to you.  That said, AFRCC would probably be sufficiently official. Turn around time with NSA might be a little long, unless they happened to be having a slow day or night.

[fyrfitrmedic]

I suppose that part of what I'm getting at is that if this is a viable search tool, why hasn't CAP made some effort to let ICs know that it is available to them? 

Any IC worth his salt should possess both flexibility of thought and an awareness of just what a big resource the AFRCC can be.

[Johnny Yuma]

AFRCC I believe ran all the searches cited in this thread, yeah I think they have it down. I don't know what legal implications there would be, but as AF is Posse Comitatus restricted & because no conversation can be heard at any point nor even an exact position... I can't see it as being that big a deal. If we need fam permission, I'm sure the controller will tell me that & I can turn around & ask the wife to sign a note for faxing/email. Why in the world would anyone do somethign for NOC or an IC that they wouldn't for AFRCC. Those guys at RCC are pretty bright & hard working. Use your resources & task them with things while you focus on your search effort. They have a lot more resources to bring to bear on problems than you do.

AFRCC has certain responsibilities given to them by law that trump PCA.

Besides, what AFRCC cannot do I''m certain your local gendarmes or State Police can once the IC's brought them into the loop...


Johnny Y.

[shorning]

National Security Agency

Intel Oversight...

[DNall]

Any IC worth his salt should possess both flexibility of thought and an awareness of just what a big resource the AFRCC can be.

Second. You don't call other federal agencies for help. You call AFRCC. They make the determination if that help is warranted, and they ask for it. Evan as a CAP SaR IC you are just a resource working the tactical aspect of a search being run by an AF controller at AFRCC. You just run your single poitn resource. If you happen to liaise w/ local authorities on scene that's fine, but AFRCC is in charge, not you.

[RiverAux]

If you happen to liaise w/ local authorities on scene that's fine, but AFRCC is in charge, not you

If you happen to liase with local authorities?  The IC or his rep should be doing this at all times during the mission.  Not sure what this has to do with the original point of the thread though. 

Guys, here is my point:  There is a technology out there that has the potential to dramatically aid CAP in certain missions.  As far as I can tell, CAP has not made any attempt to make its ICs aware of this technology, how to use it, what limitations there may be, etc.  Don't you think this is worth having some sort of information bulletin or other documentation on?   

Or are you trying to tell me that you know for a fact that AFRCC already has this factored in their procedures and upon the start of a search they will be prompting the IC for the information needed to request this information from the proper source? 

[lordmonar]

Guys, here is my point:  There is a technology out there that has the potential to dramatically aid CAP in certain missions.  As far as I can tell, CAP has not made any attempt to make its ICs aware of this technology, how to use it, what limitations there may be, etc.  Don't you think this is worth having some sort of information bulletin or other documentation on?   

Or are you trying to tell me that you know for a fact that AFRCC already has this factored in their procedures and upon the start of a search they will be prompting the IC for the information needed to request this information from the proper source? 

Well, sounds like someone has just volunteered to do some research, contact the national ES guys and do a presentation at the next NB or NEC.  Develop some training material to push down to the wings and pass it on to the squadron level.

[RiverAux]

No, I volunteered to bring it up here and as noted in the first thread, hope somebody from NHQ ES is reading it. 

Unfortunately, as I am not an IC or ES Officer this is not something I'm going to start looking into on my own as I don't have the proper authorities within CAP to start nosing around this area.  If I were, I would probably get an angry call from my Wing Commander within about a half hour of calling AFRCC and asking about this issue, which would be the logical place to start asking questions. 

Never fear, the next time I'm involved in an actual search this will be an issue I will bring up with the IC. 

[JohnKachenmeister]

NSA= No Such Agency

[aveighter]

I am surprised this thread has developed along these lines for this length of time.

The use of cell phone signals as a tracking/locating tool is not new and has been in use around here for some time.  I always assumed the methodology was in common understanding through out our community.

It can be helpful but is not a slam-dunk however, especially when planes or people go down in relatively remote areas where towers are few and far between.

[lordmonar]

NSA= No Such Agency

I don't know what you are talking about.....just stay on the line until the nondescript white van pulls up.

[Matt]

NSA= No Such Agency

I don't know what you are talking about.....just stay on the line until the nondescript white van pulls up.

I mean...

[dbaran]

The larger carriers all have emergency operations centers, who handle situations like this.   They are set up to provide the information very quickly where "exigent circumstances" exist.  Basically, that means that there has to be someone's life at stake (pretty obvious in the case of a missing airplane).   They can pull the tower and antenna sector in 2 hours or less (i.e., wake up the engineer in the middle of the night and get him to do it) and get it to the appropriate person.

This is a very different (and much faster) from a traditional criminal law enforcement request, which requires a subpoena and usually runs 30-60 days before the LE agent gets the info he wanted.

They'll take calls from law enforcement agencies if the officer will say that it is a matter of life or limb - I'm sure that they'd snap to attention if AFRCC called them.  Especially since my friend who works in one is a CAP member.

[Kojack]

It's actually pretty simple.  If you know there is a cell phone, get the number and carrier.  Call them up and ask for their security section explaining who you are.  You MUST be the IC to do this.  They will not have every person in a search calling them up.  I ran a search in April that led to a find only because of the cell phone. 

While it took awhile, bear in mind that the data has to be refined and that it will put you in the area, not necessarily on  top of the person/crash.  It does help if the cell is GPS equipped, but that's not always going to be the case.

Within 30 minutes of getting the cell number, I knew the pilot had NOT followed his stated plan and was down many miles from where we were originating the search.

Had it not been for that cell phone, we never would have found the site.

[mawr]

I used this kind of information during a missing aircraft search in October.  Alabama HLS was intrumental in getting the information that time but in the past, all you needed is a Judge to sign off on the request.  We happen to have one who is the DCC of a local squadron and it only takes about 30 min. to get her to sign off when we need it.

[RiverAux]

Okay, now you see what I'm talking about.... Apparently we have one IC who only needed to call the company but another one who was instructed that they needed to have a judge sign off on the request while another person says to call AFRCC and let them figure it out. 

Seems to me that I am right in saying there isn't any consistent CAP policy on how to approach this subject? 

Rather than have each individual IC or Wing try to figure out the labyrinth of rules and laws around this issue for themselves, national should do it and come out with explicit directions on how they want us to handle it.  And if there are some states that require different procedures because of their own state laws, that can easily be put together in a nice table giving state-by-state directions. 

[arajca]

Don't forget the differences between the cell phone company policies.

[RiverAux]

Exactly.  And keeping up with the right person to contact for the information from the cell company 24/7....

[Major Lord]

PLEASE, sweet mother of Buddha don't tell the family that we can track their loved ones' cellular phone! WE can't. Various carriers can develop good intel and occasionally, on GPS equipped phones do much better than that, but I would not count on it.

Radio direction finding of phones is tough, given the wide array of services and spectrums. If a phone is in a cell site ( and has not burned to a crisp or lost battery power) it can be "pinged" either by the phone company, or by trying to call it. The resultant "reply" can be RDF'd with the right gear in the right conditions, but don't bet on it.

[mawr]

We don't track the phones but the cell phones do ping the cell tower's when within distance.  This often has given us a last known location to start our search.   

I recently worked a missing aircraft mission where we knew that the pilot's cell phone had pinged a certain cell tower (which was along his believed flight path) but didn't ping the next tower.  This info gave us an indication of the pilots' progress along his believed flight path.

Often the Cell Phone company can tell you which panel on thier tower that the signal came from giving you additional intel (north, south, etc) 

[capcadet101]

I sure hope somebody from NHQ is reading this and can get out a quick information sheet on how CAP ICs could access this information during a search. 

And how would work, exactly?

It would work the same way that it does when cops are trying to track someone they call the service and have them track the number if they get it that is.  They would have to know what the cell phone number is to be able to do that.

[brasda91]

If the cell phone was on, and it was the right sort of cell phone, when the plane crashed and the phone survived, it may still transmit a signal that the cell phone company could pick up and CAP could use that to narrow down the search area. 

Sometimes that will depend on the cell provider, phone and user.  I have Alltel and have had a phone that would transmit the gps location constantly or only when on a call.  Some people may not all the in's and out's of their phone and not know how to turn on the constant gps function.  The phone I'm currently using doesn't have this function.