Thank you very much.
Thank you for being with us today.
I have a question with regard to general aviation and the use of ELTs. Right now, ELTs are used within small aircraft. They have a false alarm rate of about 90%, and under the current technology they only work about 64% of the time. We're talking about when a small aircraft crashes and then a signal is sent in order for that aircraft to then be found. There has been a number of incidents throughout the years when a plane has crashed and the ELT actually hasn't gone off. Most predominantly, I'm talking about an ELT 406. Of course the plane cannot be found, which means the individuals—you know they have crashed, they most likely have died upon impact, though not necessarily, and in some cases the bodies are actually never found. For example, there is a family in my riding of Lethbridge, Alberta, who lost a son and his girlfriend just last June in B.C. The aircraft went down within a forested area, it is suspected. The ELT never went off, so to this day the plane has never been found. It's almost a year later.
Now, this could be prevented, it is my understanding, if there were a GPS transmitter put within the plane as well, so that it would be both an emergency beacon that would go off if the plane crashed as well as a GPS transponder, which would send a trail of breadcrumbs, if you will, to a radio transmitter on the ground. Then there would be a record of where the plane has been every few minutes.
Is this a technology that Canada would look at, or do we feel that ELTs are doing the job they need to do in order to keep private pilots safe?