Originally Posted by
Mark 9876
Hi.
I’m a friend of those who perished in the tragedy.
Obviously this is an awful time for the family.
If someone could help clear up some questions here it will be a small comfort. The last flight track for VH-PRW on most sites ends around 11am on Sunday. Flightaware however. shows it between Jindabyne and Khancoban at 3.16 to 3.26 pm (but says “location only”).
Meanwhile RSCU660 took off from Melbourne at 2.42 pm. It then flew straight to a very narrow search site at Kiandra. It did about 10 circuits before departing. The search site closely matches where VH-PRW was ultimately found by Police and Rescue people around 11:50pm.
I am guessing that VH-PRU had some sort of emergency locator like an EPIRB that could have been triggered automatically by g-forces or something?
Does the signal from something like that explain what showed up on the Flightaware site at a time after RSCU660 was already directly en route to the crash site?
Thanks for any help
Hi Mark,
So sorry to hear of your loss.
Flightaware in that location will show ADSB out signals from the transponder only. Closer to Canberra it will show traffic on Mode Charlie old school traditional radar.
As for the rescue aircraft, I note that as part of that flight it did so a significant amount of flying in the Melbourne Port Phillip Bay Area, either before or after the flight, so be sure to check if it didn’t do that first or the timings will be affected.
*Many* missing aircraft these days are found by either their electronic flight books on an iPhone lr iPad, or via triangulation on mobile phones, so it may be one of those, or ultimately via an ELT or EPIRB signal of which most these days have a GPS location signal built in, so finding their location is almost immediate.
I note that you are referring to Sunday as the last tracked flight, however the search was on Monday. That would suggest that either the helicopter went down on Sunday OR Sunday is when it became out of range of the nearby ADSB receivers and hence the tracking ended. The other curveball is daylight savings which may have meant that the website timing could be incorrect.