In article t,
"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.

Calling before scrambling makes sense, but calling before the ETA does
not. One would *expect* that before the ETA the plane would not yet
have arrived, so calling before the ETA and learning that it has in fact
not yet arrived seems like a waste of effort to me.

rg