DP, all very good points.
Maybe we should no longer be talking about "survival equipment", but instead talk about a "survival system" (to give it a fancy name). This to suggest that you need a number of components that all need to work together to
- Get both you and the components of the system out of the aircraft (and the type of aircraft may therefore dictate what you need to carry on your body, and what you can reasonably expect to be able to take with you as a separate component - egress from the tub of a submerged weightshift microlight is a whole different game than egress from the cockpit of a low-wing four-seater with gull wing doors or a sliding canopy)
- Keep you dry (and thus warm)
- Keep you out of the water (if possible)
- Keep you more or less healthy and functioning (spray hood, drinking water, seasickness tablets, ...)
and
- Make sure you are found
No single component, whether it's a life jacket, a drysuit, a life raft, a PLB or whatnot, can fulfilll all these tasks. So to say that you need to use a life raft instead of a dry suit (or vice versa) doesn't make sense, as both play a different (though partially overlapping) role in the survival system.
Last edited by BackPacker; 8th Jul 2012 at 11:42.