Main Menu

ELT story

Started by c/LTCOLorbust, August 17, 2006, 05:37:42 PM

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

c/LTCOLorbust

Well my unit got called out on one mission early evening. There were three of us standard UDFT, we were told to go to a smaller town about half hour 45 min away... small airport. we got there around 2000 hrs. We could get the sig so we check all the aircraft on the ramp... not there... so we made our way around the airport on the road just checking the sig and then got a call from our IC telling us its not here and that the SARsats hit it in a town about an hour and half away... We were told go there... we were going to meet up with a CAP aircrew and WSDOT(Washington State Department Of transportation) ground team(they are in command of all state SAR and ES work, so WA Wing goes through them... thankfully the head of the department is a CAP LtCol.) But any way... so we are searching for this ELT we were told to meet back at the airport at 0000 hrs... we did and the aircrew had to head back to Seattle which from where we were was a good hour and a half flight... the WSDOT ground team had to head back and so did the head of WSDOT... telling us to keep searching and maybe take a break for sleep and start back up at first light... We searched all night.... the SARsats were telling us that it was up this cliff on the west side of the city... we had been getting the sig really well on the east side... well lets just check the SARsats hit out... spent an hour or more up on the cliff nothing, our locater was tell us that it was on the east side of the city... which we could see really well from up on the cliff but it was dark... So we went back to were we were before and looked around our hits on it were telling us that is was through an apple orchard... because of the dark we wanted to keep it on the road for just a bit longer... so we found the road around to the other side... a task that should have been easier but not knowing the city very well was a bit hard... we got up there still telling us it was east so we went up the road east more... Finding houses and orchards... 0400... got pulled over by the police because people in the area who should have been asleep kept see this white van... The police officer found what we were doing very cool and didn't know of any privet airstrip in the area... us not knowing that we were standing right next to that privet air strip... in the center of an orchard fenced with electric wire all the way around... the officer said he could help us look around he took his car around that orchard and thought how odd it was to have it fenced like that... 0500 we could see some kind of building in the center of that orchard and all of our hits on the sig told us it was coming from there.. so we checked it out... what we found was so cool... our hits were coming from the building all shut up no windows... off to the side a runway cleared of trees but over grown and had not been used in a long time... The police officer had a call into headquarters asking for the owners name... well they didn't have it... didn't even have that runway on record... 0600 the police officer had to take off but we kept looking around to see if any of the lights in house were on so we could ask who the owner was... we found the owner two house down from the orchard told him there was an ELT coming from the hanger in the center of his orchard... he took us up there inside he had three custom make aircraft and two older cars... we got the ELT off and all info, called our IC and headed home... but this was one for the books...       
1Lt. Joshua M. Bergland
Yakima Composite SQ.
WA Wing

SarDragon

That might make a really interesting story, if you would go back and edit it to add some returns and make it more than one paragraph. More in my PM.
Dave Bowles
Maj, CAP
AT1, USN Retired
50 Year Member
Mitchell Award (unnumbered)
C/WO, CAP, Ret

shorning

Quote from: SarDragon on August 18, 2006, 12:18:57 AM
That might make a really interesting story, if you would go back and edit it to add some returns and make it more than one paragraph. More in my PM.

Or only two sentences...