AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2020 - 90

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P&E

ADS-B

"His life raft had already sunk when they got to
him and only a single lobe of his life preserver
was functioning. The PLB saved his life for sure."
the aircrew right to the beacon, she said.
"This is why we encourage EPIRBs, PLBs,
and ELTs because they work globally and
provide SAR forces a location and a means
to home into the precise position."
The Clearwater, Florida-based Jayhawk
crew that rescued Hinkel was deployed to
Andros Island, said Lt. j.g. John Martin of
the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater
public affairs office. "They first picked up
the survivor's 406 MHz beacon emitting
from his PLB and used that to track towards
him with the direction finder. Once they
were closer, they began picking up the continuous 121.5 signal and ultimately used that
to locate the pilot." The direction finder
sends bearing information to the RMI needle on the helicopter's cockpit display.
"The pilot helped himself immensely
by having a PLB on his person when he
ditched," Martin said. "Visually spotting a
single person in the ocean is extremely difficult on the best of days, and having that
406/121.5 signal makes it infinitely easier.
His life raft had already sunk when they
got to him and only a single lobe of his life
preserver was functioning. The PLB saved
his life for sure."
GONE FISHING

The NRAT's first ADS-B save was August 18,
2019, about 1:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time.
A 1975 Cessna 206 on floats struck water
near Hopedale, Louisiana, in deteriorating
weather returning from a fishing location,
according to the NTSB preliminary report.
The pilot of another airplane reported losing radio contact with the Cessna.
Young said that four minutes after activation, an NRAT member had retrieved
ADS-B data and passed it to AFRCC; eight
minutes later, a second team member confirmed the location-noting the aircraft was
only 150 feet above the water. The Coast
Guard retrieved the pilot and both passengers; the passengers survived.
Because of its accuracy and coverage, Young anticipates a growing number

90 | AOPA PILOT September 2020

of "ADS-B saves." Legacy radar becomes
less accurate as distance from the antenna
increases, and radar sweeps take 6 to 12
seconds, he explained-while ADS-B is
accurate to within 2 or 3 meters, and transmits every second.
"There are multiple ADS-B sites and the
infrastructure to maintain an ADS-B site
is a lot less. That gives you much greater
coverage," he said. "For example, in central and western Colorado we have ADS-B
sites on mountaintops all over the place.
Previously we only had radar coverage
above around 10,000 feet. That provides us
much better coverage with ADS-B." NRAT
also has agreements with FlightAware and
FlightRadar24 to receive data from their
terrestrial receivers, and Young has begun
working with uAvionix on its dual-band
terrestrial receiver. He is using those technologies to fill gaps in existing coverage.
The Aireon satellite data is not always
helpful with belly-mounted transponder antennas, and it only includes 1090ES
data. "If someone is going to do an [ADSB] installation in the future and wants to
increase their chances of being found, I
suggest they go with 1090ES, ideally with
antenna diversity," Young said.
NRAT got its start in 1997, when an Air
Force A-10 went down in Colorado and was
missing for three weeks. CAP Capt. Guy
Loughridge, a team lead, wrote software for
tactical fire mapping; he adapted available
data, made it 3-D, and superimposed it on a
topographical map-finding the A-10. The
team has completed about 1,000 missions
and members are approaching 100,000
hours programming their software. In 2003,
notification to location determination took
six to eight hours. Last year it took Young's
team 20 minutes to run a data request; now
it's four to five seconds. "I've got the best
experts in the world at radar forensics and
programming," he said.
AOPA
EMAIL mike.collins@aopa.org

aopa.org/adsb

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2020

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