It seemed like only yesterday, but the last time I was up in a CAP airplane was back in January. With some time set aside to work from home, I had yet another chance to attend a CAP exercise yesterday, and basically followed up on the ad hoc training I did before.
Like most other aspects of flying, I'll take it.
This was a brief ground lesson on the Becker ELT receiver. If a plane goes down, the impact forces trigger an electronic transmitter that can help rescuers locate its position. Often, it isn't necessary if the accident occurs in a populated area or if there is a fire, or both. But with so much open land, locating a downed plane can take forever. In the U.S., these transmissions are on 121.5 MHz, which is monitored by most airliners and some ground locations. For training, CAP and other search agencies use special transmitters on different frequencies to avoid false alarms. This allows us to perform a "real" search for a transmitter in an unknown location.
When training and timing coincide, the result can be a speedier location, leading to rescue or recovery.
After working with the receiver on the ground, we took a short flight to track the training transmitter. Unlike last time, there was no visual target to look for, but we didn't know that at the time. The goal is to provide a narrow area into which a ground team (or perhaps a helicopter) can do a more careful search. In this case, it was necessary to do a few passes, triangulate bearings on the signal, and communicate the coordinates back to our mission base.
In all, a successful mission, and a bit more flying time where I'm actually able to look out the front window and not just a little portal on the side of an aluminum tube at 35,000 feet.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
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