Remote WA Crash, 25km walk for help
 

Broken EPIRB, wild dogs checking you out... not a great day.

Pilot who crashed in remote WA 'stalked by dingoes' on trek to safety - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

good outcome to what could have been a very sad ending.

Looking at the wreck, would a fixed EPIRB have done the trick?

Are you sure that he didn't have one? The article mentioned a broken epirb but didn't mention that is was fixed or portable. Perhaps it was a fixed one that was damaged in the crash....

FFS...Carry a Spot Tracker!
 

The story doesn't mention a GPS tracker...so I'm assuming he didn't have one.

It still astounds me that we have pilots flying remotely (or anywhere) without trackers. EVERY general aviator should be carrying one of these:

SPOT SATELLITE MESSENGER :: HOME PAGE

To do otherwise is selfish to your loved ones...and irresponsible behaviour towards the taxpayer that will spend many more $$$ than necessary trying to find WTF you are!

PG

He ought to buy a lottery ticket, that's some tiger country out there. What would have been the result if he hadn't been able to get a phone signal from the hills he knew about?
Nothing said about carrying water or survival equipment (it can go below 0 deg C out there, at nights, at this time of year).
What would have been the result if he'd been injured badly enough to stop him from walking? I have to agree with Popgun - even though this bloke was obviously experienced in the W.A. bush, the whole episode could have easily been another aviation fatality, with a couple of less-favourable events during the forced landing.
It's time for him to be a little less casual about the chances of disaster striking in remote areas.

Pure garbage!

Old habits and all that but I pop my PLB in my pocket when I take to the skies or the seas. The boat obviously has a pucker EPIRB but this acts as a back-up and really isn't noticed, whereas I'm sure the EPIRB in my pocket would attract some attention. I don't fly too remotely but I don't think $350 is a bad investment, especially as you can use it in your car, boat, aircraft, rucksack etc etc.

This or something similar

A portable beacon is probably not a bad idea, I've seen the fixed ones fail to activate (antenna cable torn away, inverted, outright destroyed) and activate on their own many times.
Of course the assumption is then that you would have time to set it off before you crash, or you are still physically able to afterwards.

Probably lost the COM aerials in the crash, and maybe was a bit leery of switching the master back on. A hand-held VHF COM unit is something I always carry. Plenty of high altitude traffic on centre frequencies or 121.5 if you like.

My guess is that his external ELB aerial was also torn off by the bush as he scraped through it - and he didn't have a portable one carried inside the cabin.

The outcome was good, but leaving the wreckage and walking off that distance goes against all the advice on survival.

happy days,

Meanwhile Australian taxpayers are spending 8-9 figures looking for a B777 which would have been located instantly if they had a $250 spot tracker on the dashboard.

Exactly :D

There is no doubt that Spot can be a useful thing. What stuns me is that the above posters think it would locate an aeroplane that was already full of million dollar electronics. Send Airbus a resume boys, they need your advice.

Trouble is, Captain Cuckoo would have turned the spot tracker off or pulled its CB along with the other gear's.

Unless it was hard-wired 'on' and inaccessible of course.

Million dollar electronics? Really???

Do you know how few years ago that Qantas were still using non-GPS equipped 737's from Melbourne to Canberra and other short sectors? :oh:

The Malaysians were too tight to pay for any kind of tracking. A Spot tracker would have left a breadcrumb for MH370 that would have led searchers straight to it. What's so hard about that?

Maybe the ABC should send there staff back to school:=

Folks,
The documented failure rate for fixed ELT (or whatever you want to call them) in actual practice is better (worse, really) than 95%.

Bloggs, before you dispute it, CASA figures. If you want them, go search them.Does anybody in their right mind think something with a 95%+ failure rate is likely to save your life, compared to a portable in your pocket, where the failure rate of the actual box is absolutely minimal.

Indeed, I always carry two, one in a pocket, the other a small marine EPIRB, it will float.

I guess that is why our old mate Bloggs is effectively supporting fixed beacons, as ever flogging dead horses.

Folks, please, whatever expensive dud might be fitted to an aircraft, have a portable in your pocket --- not in your flight bag, in your pocket.

Tootle pip!!

Absolutely and where possible activate it before touchdown/impact*

*After 4 engine failures I know this is much easier said than done. In two of them I certainly had time to do so (brain space is a different matter), but this was before affordable EPIRBs.

While the article says dingos, I'm more inclined to say it was wild dogs, there are precious few pure dingos around any more and they are timid even in a pack. Wild dogs can look just like large dingos but unlike their pure counterparts are far more aggressive in numbers.

There are plenty of stories of injured people in the outback with dogs nearby; the happy ones are rescued in time.

Very lucky to walk away; I wonder what happened to the engine.

Article from the local rag has some more photos and info:

https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/re...t-of-his-boys/