I am not trying to start conflict but I have an honest question. For those of you that do not know me my 9 year daughter was killed when a Piper Archer she was aboard crashed near Fillmore, Utah in November of last year. I have been engaged with multiple Federal Agencies, to include Senator Enzi of Wyoming. We are seeking changes in safety protocols to help S&R teams with their very tough jobs. We are seeking to launch a nation wide awareness program to educate private pilots and the public on the dangers of not filing flight plans and having inadequate beacons and or survival gear on board. What is the opinion of the pilots on this board in regards to legislation requiring flight plans when a plane is carrying passengers, specifically children, that venture more than a 50 mile radius from their departure point. I am against additional government regulation however when children and passengers are involved it changes the dynamics of the equation a bit. What are your thoughts? Thank you for your time and efforts with this. Mark

Hi Mark,

I'm so sorry for the loss of your daughter. Unfortunately the filing of a flight plan would not have saved her - only good aeronautical decision making (ADM) and keeps people alive. We are already a hyper-regulated activity - and additional regulation will probably not have a substantive affect on fatal accidents. If you really want to make a difference, help us to lobby for the ability to modify and update the aging GA fleet with new technology that allows better situation awareness and information in the cockpit and for potential SAR (407 ELTs, improved radios and navaids, inflight weather and traffic, updated engine) . Safety and power updates to aging planes is painful to impossible and very expensive - and proper, affordable technology is now largely in the realm of experimental aircraft. Regardless of regulation - pilots will continue to make bad decisions just like other users of different forms of transportation. You can outlaw drinking and driving - but people will still die because of it.

I don't know the circumstances of this crash. But I can imagine we will be discussing very soon what type of ELT, com, navaid, and wx reporting capabilities the pilot had in the air, and in the ground as a part of his/her pre-flight.

I'm sure this will be an emotionally charged discussion. Again, my sincere regrets over your ordeal. I cannot imagine.

Flight plans are not always strictly adhered to,due to pilots changing route on the fly for wx. Changing a route a couple valleys over and a search can be prolonged indefinitely due to terrain conditions. But there is absolutely no excuse now a days for every pilot not to carry a spot or similar locating beacon. It behooves me that some pilots still do not equip themselves properly according to the flight. Spot units are such incredibly cheap insurance and pax can be briefed on it's simple operation and stored location on board They are not absolutely fool proof, but at least it gives surviving victims a chance for a means to summon help quickly.

X2. Why compound your tragic loss by pursuing more regulation? It's effect will be the OPPOSITE of what you're looking for. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want my daughter's memory to be associated with anything of this nature.

soyAnarchisto wrote:Unfortunately the filing of a flight plan would not have saved her - only good aeronautical decision making (ADM) and keeps people alive.

Actually, in his case, it probably would have. It was a utility flight (going from one airport to another, so one in which a flight plan would have been useful and followed) and his daughter survived the crash and only died a couple days later from exposure. Tragic, tragic situation where a flight plan may well have made all the difference.

That said, I agree with everyone here that flight plan legislation is not the right solution. There is already legislation to require new ELTs that work better than the many decades old technology that was required until recently. Had that been in the plane the odds of survival for his daughter would have gone way up. Those rules are already in the process of being rolled out and would be useful in a far wider array of situations than this one.

As many here know, I live in Mexico. There is a requirement for flight plans for every flight here[1]. The sky isn't going to fall if that happens in the US, it only adds a few minutes to flight planning even in grossly inefficient Mexico, but given that it's not going to solve any problems it's not something to support.

[1] Insanely, if you are operating out of an airport with no DGAC (Mexican FAA) presence then you can go ahead and take off without a flight plan, but you do still have to create and close one upon landing!

When you first contacted this board, I think all of us with children and grandchildren felt at least a little of your pain and shared your grief. We all still do, I’m sure. But not only can you not bring your daughter back, but adding more regulations onto the incredible number of regulations we’re already subjected to will not help future victims of small aircraft crashes.

Aviation is already one of the most heavily regulated segments of society. Many of those regulations directly impact safety. But so much of aviation safety depends not on those regulations but on the experience level of the pilots themselves. As I often say, a pilot’s certificate is a license to learn, and a pilot learns a lot over many years of flying, no matter how well he or she did during the lessons leading to being certified. I have been flying for more than 40 years, I’ve taught flying, and I flew single engine charter for a few years, predominately in Wyoming and Colorado. I am still learning.

To answer your question specifically, flight plans add very little to safety, other than to start the search and rescue (SAR) wheels turning if the flight plan isn’t closed on time. Pilots flying VFR (visually) often must deviate from their flight planned route, for many different reasons. So if they go down, they may very well not be within miles of the route that they planned. The popular media have misled the non-flying public in that regard, because nearly always, the reporting of an aircraft accident contains the sentence, “The pilot failed to file a flight plan.” Yet, in the vast majority of cases, filing a flight plan would not have made a whit of difference.

There are a couple of things that could be done to improve the chances of a downed airplane being found. They could be equipped with better emergency locator beacons (ELTs), and the “official” SAR mentality could be changed to allow others to search in addition to the “official” crews. I’ll address each of those.

Most small airplanes are not yet equipped with 406 MHz ELTs. They are required only to be equipped with ELTs broadcasting on 121.5 and 243 MHz. Both kinds of ELTs are required to automatically activate in the event of a sufficient impact. For many years, 121.5/243 were the universal SAR frequencies, and when satellites began to be used to listen for ELT signals, that’s what they listened for. But those ELTs were often unreliable, failing to activate in some crashes but most often activating unnecessarily in nothing more than hard landings. They also did not provide much accuracy for the SAR personnel to locate them, often requiring many hours to do a grid search. Manufacturers of ELTs began to improve technology, however, and the 406 MHz ELTs now available are much more accurate and have much fewer failures.

Because the 406 MHz technology is so much more reliable and accurate, the SAR satellites no longer listen to 121.5/243 signals, effective February 1, 2009. All pilots were told through multiple media outlets literally years in advance that 121.5/243 would no longer be satellite monitored. But because updating their ELTs to 406 MHz models was not mandated for aircraft flying only within the US, and also because the cost is quite high (approximately $1,500 minimum), many US pilots have chosen not to do so. Among the pilots I know closest, I’m one of the few whose airplane is equipped with a 406 MHz ELT.

Had the aircraft your daughter was in had a 406 MHz ELT, and had it activated on impact or been manually turned on by the pilot before the impact, the crash site might have been located sooner.

For reasons that escape most of us here, the current SAR mentality is that only “official” searchers are allowed into the area in which the search is concentrated. That typically means the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). A Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) area is designated, and any pilot who is not among the official searchers is prohibited from flying within that TFR. That includes local law enforcement aviators, who are similarly prohibited from entering the TFR.

Yet in many cases, local pilots who know the terrain can be useful searchers, and with very little effort they can do so without interfering with any official searchers. By limiting who can search, searches often take much longer than necessary, and too often, they are concentrated in areas away from the more likely impact areas.

Before this “official” limiting mentality came into being, I participated in a number of searches, volunteering my time and airplane for the local Sheriff’s office when I lived in Laramie. With a couple of deputies aboard, we successfully located at least 2 victims that I can recall, even before the CAP could get their airplanes into the area.

My comments are not meant to denigrate the many good people in the CAP. But generally speaking, they are not a lot better at SAR than any of us are, especially if we know the area in which an airplane is likely to have gone down.

So if you expect to have any impact on future SAR attempts, the very best thing you can do is persuade your contacts to do what they can to eliminate the “only us” mentality, and perhaps require all aircraft to have updated 406 MHz ELTs installed. The latter has been an issue between the FAA and the FCC several times, politicians have gotten into it, and it hasn't happened yet. While others disagree, in my opinion, that should happen.

Cary

Cary just said it all.

FSS personnel need to be able to add detailed information to a VFR flight plan. At the moment, it is impossible to file a plan that accurately describes landmarks a plane would actually follow to get through the mountains, and this information must be left with friends and family. "Corona Pass" and "American Fork" and "Red Canyon" are place names they will not enter on a flight plan...no official identifiers for them. They used to 20-25 years ago...not so now.

Coincidentally, just last night I presented an aviation safety seminar entitled "Taking the Search out of Search and Rescue" in Fergus Falls, MN as part of the FAA Safety Team program.

Cary did a pretty good job summing up my feelings as well. The new generation ELTs and other tracking devices offer great promise in taking the search out of search and rescue. But, these things all require the human behind the controls to adopt that technology and use it.

The Congress could legislate flight plans, but there would be little enforcement, except perhaps in the event of an accident....and frankly, the folks who choose not to file flight plans would simply file flight plans that are so vague as to be useful anyway, assuming they actually did file.

Cary also makes an excellent point with regard to the use of Temporary Flight Restrictions over search areas. I concur that this use of the TFR system is a tragic abuse of that tool. In my experience of nearly 30 years flying in Alaska, it was almost always the local pilots who found a missing aircraft, except on the occasion where the military was involved. Putting a TFR over a potential search area to keep out non-CAP personnel is an abuse of that system in my opinion, and needs to be stopped.

Finally, pilots are humans, and as such we all have flaws and failures. It's easy to become complacent and think that it won't happen to me.....but it can. Any way we can reach out to pilots to convince them that it's in their passengers' best interest to take these safety considerations seriously will be a positive step.

Sorry for your loss, but thank you for reaching out to try to prevent anything like this from happening again.

MTV

First and foremost please let me say I am terribly sorry for your loss. As a parent, I too simply can't imagine.

Next let me add that as someone who has lost a loved one, it is a natural instinct to try and make that loss stand for something. Thank you for taking the time to research that goal prior to making a knee jerk induced reaction. I think you will find that the concept of a VFR flight plan serves best as a tool for just that flight planning. It is an antiquated process at best, for the purpose of SAR. Even VFR flight following, which is not compulsory nor assumed with a flight plan is a poor but better choice for SAR. I don't know if you understand these two separate services in their entirety ....my experience has been that the non flying general public usually thinks that a flight plan functns as a flight following.

As others have pointed out. We are in a far more technologically advanced state than the days that the flight plan were born in. A very simple flight briefing, with an introduction to the manual activation switch on the ELT was the single 3 minute step that would have saved your daughters life. Having that ELT be a GPS enabled 406 would have given her recovery an almost guarantee, with a time to recover of likely less than an hour.

Good luck on your trail, and your healing process our thoughts are with you.

As everyone has said, we are sorry for your loss. But I do feel you are headed in the wrong direction. A solution for finding an accident fast would be to upgrade to 406ELT's, get a SPOT messanger or tell a friend/family member your plans. Don't require a flight plan, that's government BS and we already have enough of that, plus as stated above you can't even enter the info you'd need with the way people fly around terrain/weather etc. Also if you planned to land at a remote airstrip or runway that had no cell service or poor radio contact with Flight Service stations then you would have to either climb up high to close the flight plan, or circle till you got in touch with someone to close it for you. Would you want to circle around burning gas just to close a flight plan? Also if you close it before you land, and then crash when you're on approach to land then what good did the flight plan ever do??

Again, I don't mean to be harsh, but realistic. How would you feel if every time you left your house to drive to the store you had to file a flight plan? Call in/radio in to open and close it. You'd have to circle around your house before you could land, to ensure the flight plan was closed too. You wouldn't even want to go to the store if you had to do that every time you drove!

Also I think we need to fix the SAR portion of the problem. That's a whole different can of worms.

I would like to add my condolences, and my support for your mission to improve the SAR system. However, as has been said already, there are many times where adding to existing regulations, or simply making up more rules so some Congressman looks like they are doing their job, is going to do more harm than good. This might be one of them.

Having the CAP (or anyone else) walk in and take over a search, and prevent all other resources from participating, is really bad. If they indeed do that as they have been accused of doing, then that has to be stopped. Perhaps that is the cause you should take up in memory of your daughter.

Another possibility is taking up the cause of creating an integrated system whereby the CAP, and volunteer local pilots, and any involved law enforcement, and any involved military, all work together under one command post (perhaps even an airborne command post). This way, there is the maximum number of resources being put to use, and someone will be there to coordinate and manage each of the resources, prevent any chaos or missed opportunities, etc.

The bottm line is that leaving an available resource un-used in a life or death emergency, because of political positioning or ego, is something you might be able to change.

I do not have any SAR experience personally, these are ideas only.

Finally, THANK YOU for reaching out and starting an open and un-biased discussion on this. That is exactly the kind of class and forward thinking that can do some good in the world. I think it is safe to say that this online community, and the overall pilot community, will be glad to work with you to arrive at a balanced and useful outcome.

Cary wrote:Before this “official” limiting mentality came into being, I participated in a number of searches, volunteering my time and airplane for the local Sheriff’s office when I lived in Laramie. With a couple of deputies aboard, we successfully located at least 2 victims that I can recall, even before the CAP could get their airplanes into the area.

This post is on behalf of a CAP friend who can't post himself due to new user registration being shutoff in anticipation of BCP 3.0.314159265. All of the comments below are his:

To the gentleman who put a couple of deputies in his plane and found two victims:
1) Congratulations.
2) Damn risky thing to do if you're not trained in Search and Rescue.
3) It's that everyone flocking to the area in airplanes and bumping into each other phenomenon is exactly why TFRs are set up and SAR is called in.
4) What if that pilot had gone down too? The liability implications are staggering.
5) Do people not realize that CAP pilots ARE local pilots who know the area?
6) Yes, CAP has its limitations and hoops to jump through.
7) Most pilots, even experienced ones, don't know how to do SAR. That's just to emphasize the point that if you don't know what you're doing, try to help out the ones who do.
If you know the area, can conduct Search and Rescue, and a good pilot. Why are you not in the CAP helping to enhance its SAR capability? We cld certainly use the experience and help!

Yup, CAP has its share of pilots who seem to think we're flying F-16s or something, but for the most part....We're just safer pilots who jump through a lot of hoops and dedicate a lot of time, money, and effort to do what we do.

I am too very sorry for your loss as a father of 2 I cannot imagine the pain.

There was a previous thread on this I assume you read it all?
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=11382&start=40

This is from page 3 the 7th post down, I was going to copy and paste but I read something that would be quite disturbing to you as it was to me so I didn't. My take on this is that from the start of the time people became aware that the plane was overdue a search should have been initiated and was not. I sure hope that if I become missing that the people involved in the original search for this plane have revised their methods.

rw2 wrote:
This post is on behalf of a CAP friend who can't post himself due to new user registration being shutoff in anticipation of BCP 3.0.314159265. All of the comments below are his:

To the gentleman who put a couple of deputies in his plane and found two victims:
1) Congratulations.
2) Damn risky thing to do if you're not trained in Search and Rescue.
3) It's that everyone flocking to the area in airplanes and bumping into each other phenomenon is exactly why TFRs are set up and SAR is called in.
4) What if that pilot had gone down too? The liability implications are staggering.
5) Do people not realize that CAP pilots ARE local pilots who know the area?
6) Yes, CAP has its limitations and hoops to jump through.
7) Most pilots, even experienced ones, don't know how to do SAR. That's just to emphasize the point that if you don't know what you're doing, try to help out the ones who do.
If you know the area, can conduct Search and Rescue, and a good pilot. Why are you not in the CAP helping to enhance its SAR capability? We cld certainly use the experience and help!

Yup, CAP has its share of pilots who seem to think we're flying F-16s or something, but for the most part....We're just safer pilots who jump through a lot of hoops and dedicate a lot of time, money, and effort to do what we do.

To your CAP friend...

The arrogance in his above comments is indicative of the problem with the Civil Air Patrol in general. It is a disservice to the victims that need help and it's killing people like Marks daughter and ex that could otherwise have a far better chance of being saved. You (CAP) isn't saving the rest of the trained pilot population from ourselves, you are putting lives in jeopardy.

And no, us hick pilots don't think you're flying F-16's.

Mark:

The tragic loss of your daughter HAS made a difference, at least in my flying. Following the awful events prompted me to add a 406 PLB to my SPOT tracking, and regular training for my two children on its use in the event I am incapacitated in an accident. I'm not yet convinced that the faIlures that have plagued the 121.5 mhz ELT's have been dramatically improved with the 406 mhz units, while the communication side is better there are too many failures of the system yet.

I believe the greatest benefit could be achieved through a pilot education campaign sponsored by ASN or a similar outlet. I remember seeing a presentation not too long ago regarding a seaplane pilot who tragically lost his son in a gear down water landing. I could hardly make it through the video. I believe pilots will respond to that message in place of more regulation.

Lastly, I am so sorry for your loss. I think about you and your daughter every time I take my kids flying. It adds that extra level of attention to make sure that I have done my part as a pilot to mitigate the risks where I can.

Flynengr

Let me add my condolences. I can't imagine your pain, and pray that I never have to endure such a terrible loss.

On the legislative front, there's no need to mandate filing of flight plans. The ADS-B mandate will render VFR flight plans completely superfluous as of 2020. Anyone who uses their airplane to travel will be legally required to install a transponder that broadcasts GPS position, speed and altitude on two frequencies. ATC will have a near real-time track for every aircraft so equipped. That's far superior to any VFR flight plan as an SAR resource.

ADS-B won't automatically send a distress signal like a g-activated switch on an ELT (which switches are notoriously unreliable), but it will leave a precise track to the crash site.

Expense of ADS-B Out is a serious issue for me and other pilots I know. The lowest prices I see for the equipment are around $4,000 installed. The exact same benefit can be had by the pilot for about 5% of the cost by using a SPOT, and SPOT has SOS and messenger functions. So, there are already private alternatives to ADS-B OUT that deliver greater safety and value than ADS-B OUT ever will.

That said, there are still some pilots who do not carry a SPOT or a 406 PLB and fly airplanes that do not have a 406 ELT. The ADS-B mandate will close that gap, but at the expense of pilots like me who already have GPS-enabled ELTs and PLBs.

If legislation is needed, a requirement to carry a GPS-enabled PLB such as SPOT or an ACR unit would make a lot more sense than the mandate to install ADS-B OUT equipment. Failing that, having the government pay to equip all aircraft with ADS-B OUT transponders would close the SAR gap without forcing the majority of us who already carry GPS-enabled PLBs and/or ELTs to subsidize the FAA's NextGen project to the tune of thousands of dollars out of our own pockets.

I agree about ending the abuse of TFRs. If CAP was just a database of knowledgeable local pilots who coordinate rescues, then I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I have no time for or interest in participating in the faux military and bureaucratic aspects that I've observed over the years.

CAVU

Cub271 wrote:The arrogance in his above comments is indicative of the problem with the Civil Air Patrol in general. It is a disservice to the victims that need help and it's killing people like Marks daughter and ex that could otherwise have a far better chance of being saved. You (CAP) isn't saving the rest of the trained pilot population from ourselves, you are putting lives in jeopardy.

We'll have to wait for June and see if he wants to jump into the shark tank once user registration comes back online, but I will tell you from personal experience that the *last* word I would use to describe him is "arrogant".

rw2 wrote:BCP 3.0.314159265.

No pi for you.

Zzz wrote:

rw2 wrote:BCP 3.0.314159265.

No pi for you.

Figured you would be the first to notice that one.

ShysDad-My condolences and prayers.

Based on my experience as instructor for CAP in Gallup, NM for many years, I have to completely agree with Cary. As a recent veteran and still member of the National Guard at that time, I was appalled with the lack of effectiveness of CAP. Hopefully that has changed. But, considering the structure of the organization, I expect it has not. Unfortunately bureaucracies tend to have more image orientation than mission orientation.