Quote:
Originally Posted by lakelandterrier
<snip>
otherwise what's the point of the exercise? - <snip>
If the emergency services will respond to a PLB activation without the official registration anyway, - which is the case - why go through the admin?.....if it needs to be registered first there are thousands of people at risk through this long delay in processing.
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Of course they respond to an unregistered device. How could they justify leaving you to drown because of what could be a simple admin error.
But there are lots of dots to be joined to build the SAR picture.
Scenario 1:
LakelandTerrier has gone out on his RIB. He has a major problem and has ended up in the water, he is off-shore out of handheld VHF range. Out of mobile phone range. He presses the magic button on his PLB. Satellites do their thing and the alert arrives in Falmouth, hopefully with a position but usually without a proper fix first. They look you up on the paperwork submitted (even if you haven't had the certificate). They call your mobile. Straight to voicemail. They call your shore contact. They say they know you are out on the boat today but haven't heard from you that there is a problem. They know where you launch from. They can confirm what your RIB looks like etc and that matches your registration information.
CG is now issuing an all ships message by VHF. CG is tasking resources. CG is tasking shore team to where you are thought to launch from. Search underway. People know what they are possibly looking for.
Scenario 2:
A newbie who didn't know to register, has done exactly the same. He is now in the water and pressed the magic button. CG have no shore details to confirm. Have no idea what they are looking for. Person in water? A boat? RIB? Yacht? A ship? One person or 6 or 18? An accidental activation? With an initial search zone of 5miles at best. What should they task? A helo? A ILB, an ALB? Shore Teams? All. Asking vessels in the area for information - but information about what...?
A search will happen. It will probably actually be kicked off around the same time. But they wont have a clue what to look for.
THAT is the reason you register - so that someone looking for you knows what you look like and can be found. So that if something goes wrong you can hopefully cancel a false alarm before every resource they can think of gets thrown at the [non]incident.
It seems crazy that your online form doesn't feed directly into their database (but it does avoid the risk that I somehow corrupt the database!), and the database doesn't then produce an automated certificate etc. But provided the online forms are searchable it doesn't make a huge difference... "Not in the database - check the online forms waiting to register"
Black Hawk
Ocean Devil
