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