121.5, Not Your Daddy's ELT Frequency

With all the news of the recent Cessna 150K Capitol Bomber ADIZ incursion, this little tid-bit came out

"The situation was made worse by the fact that the "Guard" radio frequency (121.5 MHz) was blocked by the accidental activation of of an emergency locator beacon in an aircraft on the ground, according to military pilots who spoke with the Post. Schaeffer's attorney, who is appealing revocation of the 69-year old pilot's flying pilot certificate, said the ELT transmission kept the errant flyers from leaving the ADIZ sooner."

:: Aero-News.net : ADIZ Violators Were Seconds Away From Shoot-Down

This underscores the critical importance Civil Air Patrol's SAR teams play in today's Homeland Security environment.  The pilot is claiming that he couldn't hear the alerts & fighters on Guard due ELT masking (does anybody else think this is a little bit of BS?  A Blackhawk 150 feet off your wing blasting you with his military-grade VHF should be able to override an tiny ELT miles away, right?), and as a consequence, he came pretty close to being the first miltiary-civil shootdown over our nation's capitol. Ouch.

While most of us think of 121.5 as the ELT frequency, its also one of the two "Guard" frequencies, channels that are supposed to be continually monitored by aircraft in flight (the other is 243.0, but that, if I recall correctly, is military-only)

So that errant ELT accidental activation you're running around trying to find, while possibly being a crashed airplane, could also be a factor in a much, much larger issue.  All the more reason to find and silence an accidentally activated ELT in a timely manner.  The life you could be saving could actually be someone completely unrelated to the operation at hand!

Comments

[tribal elder]

Perhaps ELT activation will now be uniformly treated as an emergency. I used to think Langley had an instruction -- "And don't call CAP until the long distance rates goes down."

http://www.cafepress.com/terpsboy