SARSAT stats

[TangoWhiskey]

Here are the U.S. stats NOAA presented at a SARSAT meeting at the end of August.

ELT - 18% of registered beacons 51% of false alerts
EPIRB - 51% of registered beacons 27% of false alerts
PLB - 31% of registered beacons 21% of false alerts

Put in overall terms, the US False Alert Rate by device type:

ELT 5.05%
EPIRB 1.12%
PLB 0.64%

There are 20 to 30 406 beacon activations per day. 90+% are false activations. High, but most are handled by a phone call to the registered owner. With 121.5 beacons the activations per day was in the hundreds.

World-wide beacon stats

Beacons made in 2012 (and production vs 2011):

69,300 EPIRB -3.5%
68,800 PLB +13.7%
22,000 ELT -10%

Of those beacons...

98,000 were Location Protocol, i.e. those with a built-in GPS or can be connected to one

68% PLB
25% EPIRB
7% ELT

The estimate is that of all the beacons world-wide, about 1.31 million, only 43.6% are GPS capable.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Is there a link for the 2013 data?

I assume the following is the equivalent presentation from last year?:

http://www.sarsat.noaa.gov/BMW 2012_files/2012 BMW False Alert Stats 2012_NOAA.pdf

 

[denverpilot]

I highly recommend people add the GPS option if they are using the new beacons. You should see people try to figure out how to DF the pulsed output of the newer ones if they've been used to the continuous sweep of the old 121.5 ones their entire lives. It isn't pretty. I'd say about 50% "get it" yet... maybe not even that many. The GPS version if it works, eliminates all that... you're probably not very far from the last coordinates stored in the ELT.