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Personal Locator Beacon Increase Risk?
On Oct 27, 9:02*am, rlovinggood wrote:
An article by Tracie Cone of the Associated Press was published in our local newspaper and it questioned if Personal Locator Beacons gives us a sense of security that allows us to push onwards, where otherwise we might not. From her article: "Now you can go into the back country and take a risk you might not normally have taken," says Matt Scharper, who coordinates a rescue every day in a state with wilderness so rugged even crashed planes can take decades to find. *"With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn't have been in in the first place." I never considered a SPOT or other PLB to by a "Yuppie 911." Ray Lovinggood Carrboro, North Carolina, USA Ah but I often see pilots hopping into gliders with just no survival preparation. It happens all the time. And in some cases they would not have SPOT if the glider FBO did not provide it. No notice left where they are intending to fly to, no recovery/ground-crew plan, no backup handheld VHF radio, no extra water, no food, no shelter materials, warm jacket or space blankets etc. (cold nights in the mountains), no way to easy start a fire (may or may not be a good idea), no first aid kit/medical supplies, etc. etc. Wearing a t-shirt and sandals, like they were diving to the mall. Familiarity breeds contempt and in many places people are used to doing 500km milk runs over and over that let people sit back in their arm-chair ride feeling this is easy and very safe. One little mistake or problam or two and they can quickly be in a survival situation. Things like SPOT just draw attention to problem cases, without SPOT they would go unnoticed or they would just be filtered from the gene pool. My sympathy is entirely with the search and rescue and other staff that are required to go find some of the twits described in these stories. I do kind of expect however with the glider pilots I see who make no survival planning that the existence of SPOT or PLBs has little effect, they might perceived it as somewhat useful but if their understanding of survival planning is so confused up to start with I am not sure they are going to push more or less harder because they have an electronic gizmo. They will however get more noticed once they screw up. Darryl |
#12
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Personal Locator Beacon Increase Risk?
rlovinggood wrote:
An article by Tracie Cone of the Associated Press was published in our local newspaper and it questioned if Personal Locator Beacons gives us a sense of security that allows us to push onwards, where otherwise we might not. From her article: "Now you can go into the back country and take a risk you might not normally have taken," says Matt Scharper, who coordinates a rescue every day in a state with wilderness so rugged even crashed planes can take decades to find. "With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn't have been in in the first place." I never considered a SPOT or other PLB to by a "Yuppie 911." Ray Lovinggood Carrboro, North Carolina, USA That's strange, I heard on NPR the other day, that more folks with concealed carry guns are murdered than unarmed people. One factor (he said) was that people feel more confident in entering shady districts. In the good ol' US that's a dangerous mistake, apparently. Brian W |
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