Ooops…
I understand marine liferafts and jackets can accidentally inflate.
Aviation ones leak gas to the outside unless deliberately triggered.
Safer to find they won’t inflate after ditching than to have them inflate in flight. )-:
Bloody hell!!!
I keep a knife handy for this purpose.
Do we know more about that picture? How old is it? Is there a NTSB/AAIB/… report ?
Xtophe wrote:
Do we know more about that picture? How old is it? Is there a NTSB/AAIB/… report ?
According to here the date is 1 Sep 2014 (Labour day)
AvWeb
I am updating my maritime survival kit and my orion skyblazer flares are coming to expiration date. For reference, we carry it attached to our liferaft for overwater flights.
What is the advise from the collective forum wisdom on whether to simply replace flares with new ones or perhaps do away with the associated risks and complexity and use a strobe light instead?
The biggest flare advantage I see is during daylight when a smoke-trailing bright dot going up 300ft in the air will be much more visible than any sea-level strobe.
The cons are of course potential for the user being hurt upon use as well as the associated fire risk.
The biggest strobe advantage I see is the extended duration vs the four single-use flares we carry.
What do you guys carry for visibly attracting attention of rescuers?
Firstly, let me preface this with that fact that I have ZERO expertise in this area! Only opinion!
But my thoughts would be: –
Flare visible from further away, but only for a short while. What if S&R is close but looking in another direction? Do you let it off hoping to be seen or wait until they are more looking in your direction? With the strobe you can use it for much longer, but not be as visible.
Will your hands be warm enough to be able to use the flare? On some of my hiking and camping trips I’ve certainly faced the position where my hands were getting so cold that it was getting hard to make them do what I wanted them to do! You’re generally in hotter waters, so that might not be so much of an issue for you. But if you can’t operate the flare and aim it, when you need it, it might not be of so much use.
Personally I think I’d be inclined to call up your local search and rescue and discuss it with them. They will give you a much better insight into what they can detect easily with their equipment and systems. You might even get a tour of their facilities or invited along on a training mission if you’re really lucky! 
As I posted further back, I had some handheld flares which just gave out a bright light, and a parachute flare.
The former can easily be replaced with bright LED lights, and much more safely from the aircraft carriage POV.
The latter just blew up, with the innards narrowly missing my foot. The parachute part of it was very brief, because the chute didn’t open. It was just slightly out of date, but I would rate this as very poor. It was stored in a dry building.
My plan, effective enough or not is to rely on the visibility of my raft coupled with my PLB.
At night a strong torch (high lumen LED) should help with the final phase.
I don’t fly at night but an afternoon incident could easily mean a night rescue.
Saves worrying about the safety and renewal of flares.
If I was doing regular big sea crossings like Scotland to Norway, I’d probably carry one each of everything from the safety catalogue!! But there comes a point where perhaps a well maintained twin with ample fuel is the best safety device.
Thank you all
What if S&R is close but looking in another direction?
Yes, that is a bummer: one would hope they would look in all directions within a 20-sec period ? Especially when in the vicinity of the PLB coordinates, but if the latter fails this is a serious flaw of the flare logic during the daytime.
Will your hands be warm enough to be able to use the flare?
I just bought handwarmers to add to my kit: they are light and more important than they otherwise seem to be, especially in cold waters.
call up your local search and rescue and discuss it with them
Already spoke to them during a recent local demonstration of military equipment! There are three pieces of equipment they advised dearly: liferaft, PLB and PLB: they also advised to carry a PLB with oneself, all in that order. The issue is the PLB updates position every x minutes so, you may have drifted one or more km’s from the last transmitted position. Then a radio able to communicate on 121.5 is also useful. They carry on their aircraft a “rescue chain” with bigger, better equipment to deploy once they see the survivors. How they see you (we did not explicitly ask on flares, so need to bring it up to them) and how you get to it when in the water is a different matter, but there is a long floating rope linking them supposedly aiding that.
@Peter has clearly lost his trust in flares, and almost his foot with it too…
I don’t fly at night but an afternoon incident could easily mean a night rescue.
That is my logic: you have to be prepared to stay one night at sea, even if you only fly during the daytime.
GA_Pete wrote:
regular big sea crossings like Scotland to Norway
That is no place for a SEP. The key is “regular” vs “occasional”
And yes I am more worried about visibility during the daytime than night. A bright strobe should be good for night, but in the day? I’d rather be seen during the day and not wait till night time. Rescue resources are also bound to be more scarce at night.
