Steven P. McNicoll wrote:
"Guy Elden Jr" wrote in message
oups.com...
Sounds good to me. Much easier for them to make a phone call than to
scramble a CAP flight for a pilot who simply forgot to close a VFR
flight plan. Seems like this private industry thing might actually be
able to control costs - who woulda thunk it!


The new policy isn't making a phone call instead of scrambling a CAP flight,
it's calling at or before the ETA instead of beginning a search after the
ETA. The first step in the search was always a phone call.


Yep, it was 30 minutes of grace period and then 30 minutes of hunting
around and sending ALNOTs before you ever got anywhere near a real
SAR response.