This Sounds Familiar

According to the FAA—thanks to AVSIG friend Capn. Randy Sohn for sending me this info—on February 1, 2009, the International Cospas-Sarsat Organization (U.S. included) will "terminate processing signals emitted by 121.5 MHz Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELTs)." The guvmint wants us all to obtain 406 MHz ELTs, which will be processed by the Cospas-Sarsat system. (I didn’t even know there was such a group. Sounds like some kind of health food to me.) I’ve been through all of this before, with slightly different numbers. We had been stumbling along without ELTs since the Wright Brothers, but it hadn’t bothered Congress a whole lot until one of their own—Congressman Hale Boggs—disappeared in a Cessna 310 in Alaska. This was too much for Congress, which decided something had to be done. So they—Congress, not the FAA—mandated ELTs and all airplanes—with a very few exceptions—had to have one. Oops! There weren’t that many ELTs available. The deadline was extended because you really couldn’t buy the damn things. Eventually that got straightened out and all God’s chillun had ELTs. Oops! Some of the batteries required by law were defective. Now everybody had to throw away those batteries and get new, nondefective batteries. Oops! You couldn’t buy the new batteries. I remember; I tried like heck to find them for brand-new airplanes—you couldn’t get them. Helluva mess. But, eventually we got by that mess, too. Since then, ELTs have proven to be less than ideal. More than 97 percent of the alerts over the years have been defective. Much time and money was spent searching for airplanes that were not lost. One time, at Huntsville (AL) Aviation, a tornado flattened our main storage hangar and balled up a lot of airplanes on the ramp. We had airplanes stacked like cordwood and ELTs beeped away like a dump truck backing up. This went on for weeks. So, now we will have the 406 MHz ELTS. I surely hope we get that done with less hassle and better results than we had with the original ELTs. Keep your fingers crossed. We'd love to publish your comments. Please click the comment tab at the top.