ultimate pilot survival kit

I agree that most of the survival kits (well...pretty much most of everything) marked to pilots is of little use and poor value. Of course, can you think of any pre-made kit for anything that was worth the money or that couldn't be made better?

The accepted adage in wilderness flying is that survival gear is what's attached to your body and everything else is camping gear. Airplanes have a tendency to burn up or sink, and there's no reason to believe that if you survive the crash you'll have anything but what you were wearing when you got in and put on the seat belt.

The things that are always in my bushplane are water, sleeping bag, down coat, axe, saw, signaling equipment, hand held radio, repair tools and materials and a first aid kit. But I can't really strap that stuff to me, so I consider it baggage.

In a kit I wear in a chest pack I have a personal locator beacon, space blankets, paracord, puukko knife, narcotics, fire starting materials, signal mirror, pyrotechnic flares and a flashlight.

Yes, there's a lot of other stuff I'd like to have, but I need a kit that will not only let me get through the door of the plane, but which is small and light enough that I'll wear it all the time. Lots of pilots put thirty or forty pounds of gear in a vest then don't wear it because it makes their back hurt or it's too hot or it makes it difficult to enter and exit the plane. So they hang the vest on the back of their chair and it becomes...yup, baggage. Military survival kits come out with the aircraft seat when the pilot ejects and they can be a lot larger. Civilian pilots don't have that sort of luxury, so the kit has to be kept small enough to wear.

The PLB means that in all but the most unusual situations I'll get assistance in 24 to 48 hours, and probably sooner. Whether I can survive that long with what I've got on me is going to depend mostly on how I fared during the emergency landing, and that's impossible to predict.

There is simply no other activity that places a person further from help in a shorter time than flying an airplane. You can be half a mile from a major road and never be found, simply because there's no other way to get there than falling out of the sky. Look at the effort spent to find Steven Fossett and what it amounted to: they didn't find him but they did find a half dozen crashes dating back fifty years which had never been discovered and all of which were within a dozen miles of a road. (Fossett's remains were later found by hikers.)

It's easy to look at the possible scenarios and start filling the plane with survival gear, but a major cause of aircraft crashes in mountainous terrain is a lack of climb performance. So every ounce of survival gear you load on increases your likelihood of needing to use it.
 
ThriftyJoe said:
A couple of days ago just for fun, I was Googling up some "pilot survival kits". I figured if anybody was going to find himself suddenly teleported into the back country with only a small kit of stuff to survive with, it's a bush pilot, assuming he survives the crash.

Sporty's keeps the timid safe, but there are better places to buy a aviation survival kit. The funny thing about this place that I'm going to recommend is that their name is related to an engine failure and the best glide slope may be critical to survival, hence "Best Glide"

There are a lot of spoof survival places around but when your in a situation like this one
http://www.faa.gov/tv/?mediaId=470

Well, you can sure spend a lot of money on a survival kit for a light plane. This one is $2500: http://www.sportys.com/pilotshop/product/16092 It has three knives and a saw in it, and a sharpener. Look at all those miscellaneous small doodads. Lots of cable ties and safety pins. But you know what was missing, from even the most expensive kits I looked at, from my perspective as a backpacker? A warm sleeping bag! Even the biggest most expensive kits omit a good sleeping bag. You just get a fancier version of the old space blanket.

Some of those double layer bivys are nice there are a couple I keep on seeing as ultra light weight...

I made the mistake of taking just a thin liner bag and a space blanket on a trip recently. It got down around 40 F. I was in a tent. Wow, that was miserable. I survived of course, but imagine how it would have been in a spring or fall 20 F night with just that space blanket? Pure suffering; maybe hypothermia. I think I might just wrap the damned thing over my head, and fasten it with rubber bands around my neck...hoping to end my suffering sooner. :eek:

So real sleeping bags are bulky of course, and you can't store them crammed into a tight small stuff sack, or they lose their loft and their warmth. I don't own a bush plane, but if my life depended on it, I think I would make room for a good sleeping bag in a loose sack. A GPS too, if I had to walk out of there. You don't know where you're going to crash ahead of time, so you won't have a trail map with you. Knowing the direction and distance back to town would sure be nice if you're able bodied enough to walk out.

Ya ' Id take a bag and have a secondary a "real secondary" those lil' space blankets are scary how they are marketed

OK, so my ultimate pilot survival kit, for well under $2500? Absolute minimum items I think I would need:

winter weight sleeping bag
bivy, to keep it dry

yup, nice choice!

poncho, to stay dry during the day

poncho is a good rain shelter if that!

GPS, loaded with maps, with rechargeable batts and a solar charger, or just a lot of lithium batts

Sounds cool, check out your aeronautical GPS with your aeronautical charts ++

big heavy duty water bag like an MSR Dromedary; if I find any water I want to take a lot with me
as many Protein Powerbars as I can fit

yeah, your talkin last hunt's score of beef jerky! jk (kinda)

...all of it loosely packed in a 65 liter backpack, so the sleeping bag doesn't get compressed.

OK, OK, a SAK Farmer in there too. I get $1137 for the whole kit, which is less than half the ready made kit above. The sleeping bag is pricey at $450, but worth it if you're crashed in cold weather. Even a cheap sleeping bag would be better than a space blanket.

Hope fully there is some trees or brush to burn. High desert is arid and barren.


You say you might be too injured to walk out? If you're that injured, can you really gather and split (it might be raining) enough wood to stay warm around the clock with a broken leg? Can you build a shelter? If you're seriously injured, wouldn't you rather crawl into a warm sleeping bag and wait for rescue, than have to drag yourself around gathering wood to start a fire?

The old E.L.T. transmitters recently got pulled and are no more functional (for our purposes)
Update your ELT if you haven't, then check out some personal distress beacons.

What do you think?
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Rock on bro! sometimes if I can't think about anything else I research this stuff.

++ Good luck bro! We are all here for a limited time.
 
Thought you would like to know …. The winner of the AIC/UAF Arctic Innovation Competition was the Airlite Inflatable Snowshoe. 212 inventors from around the world entered this competition held on Friday, Oct. 19th, 2012, at the University Alaska Fairbanks.

Rick

Rick Stafford
Airlite Inflatable Snowshoes
 
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Goldmizer said:
Thought you would like to know …. The winner of the AIC/UAF Arctic Innovation Competition was the Airlite Inflatable Snowshoe. 212 inventors from around the world entered this competition held on Friday, Oct. 19th, 2012, at the University Alaska Fairbanks.

Rick

Rick Stafford
Airlite Inflatable Snowshoes
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Those are pretty interesting, but at 34~36 ounces per pair, not including patch kit, pump, or crampons, they really don't save you any weight over the Northern Lites brand of snowshoe which comes with double crampons and no need to inflate, albeit at a higher cost.

Nowhere on their web page could I find a image of the deflated snowshoes, so I don't know if they roll up small or not, and I'm not sure it's that big an issue, as I've never had trouble lashing snowshoes to a load.

It is pretty neat technology, though. I wish my thermarest was that tough.
 
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Interesting thread!

Wow -$2500 for that kit; looking it over, all that gear could be had for far, far less.

A locator beacon of some sort is the most critical piece of kit in an airplane, ocean vessel, or even a party of mountaineers/backcountry skiers who head into deep wilderness [I have a gnarly story involving the latter and a sat phone]. I would suspect that all aircraft would be required to carry an EPIRB, which would automatically deploy and transmit a SOS/Position signal upon a crash. All commercial vessels are required to have EPIRBs.

I think the style of kit and it's contents [beyond the 10+ essentials] depends on the type of flying and location. In the PNW, we have a lot of seaplanes so I'd want some type of raft or inflatable device to keep me and my passengers out of the ocean. In AK, inflatable snowshoes or similar might be a very important addition. A very good GPS would be important too.

For your average bush pilot flying over mountains or other land based geography, I'd say you could carry all you need in a 20-30 lb package. As mentioned above, anything that 'lofts' or provides passive warmth is the tough one. I think, at least for me, if I was a bush pilot, I'd have three items for warmth: a waterproof/breathable down/synthetic parka, a bivy sac, and a high quality down sleeping bag. The bivy would stay stowed, but I'd pull the sleeping bag/parka every weekend or every other day and let it loft out - then re-stow/compress before commencing flying. Sure it's a pain, but we're talking about mere seconds here. It just becomes one of your pre flight checklist things you do. A quality bag can endure longer periods of compression and is more likely to be bomber.

I'd store all this gear in a 40 litre or similar waterproof backpack [incase you have to move away from the fuselage] made out of a heavyweight ballistic-type or similar nylon that could resist puncturing or catastrophic damage in the event of a crash.
 
While some parts of your kit will be "universal" in nature, quite a few items will change with regard to the environment in which you find yourself. Having flown many thousands of hours in such varied places as North, Central & South America, as well as in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, all in light aircraft, my personal kit changed as dictated by the environment.

Regards,
Ron
 
Joe, none of us are "experts"...we all are still learning in this "game!" One thing that was and still is "universal" in my kit is a good Swiss Army Knife...they are absolutely indispensable anywhere you may find yourself! SAK...don't leave home without it!

Regards,
Ron
 
ThriftyJoe said:
Please do tell. I want to hear the gnarly story (cough) I mean, cautionary tale. :p
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Alright here it is. I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I think it's pertinent and the OP asked for it. I'll keep it brief. Take from it what you want.

Three acquaintances of mine had hired a bush plane to drop them onto a glacier deep into a British Columbian mountain range [in April]. They were about to embark on a 10 day ski traverse heading to an extraction point where the same bush plane would pick them up. They had emergency equipment dispersed between them and one such piece of equipment was a SAT phone. Obviously, for a trip such as this, keeping weight low is paramount. Towards the end of day one, with 70+ lb packs [they were basically setting-up a camp each day/every few days and then doing lightweight day trips], they were skiing down a glacier to their first camp. Normally, when travelling on a glacier, a party is roped together because of crevasses. Because it was early in the season [good snowpack and most crevasses have filled-in] and skiing downhill roped is difficult, they made the decision to stay unroped. They were very experienced ski mountaineers so this wasn't necessarily a bad idea. Skiing downhill, one person fell 100 feet into a crevasse ... and he had the SAT phone. Luckily, another person in the party had the rope [literally just long enough] and they were able to rappel into the crevasse and retrieve the phone and assess their friend's condition [he was killed on impact]. Once back on the glacier, they were able to effect a rescue. If they hadn't had that SAT phone, they would have had to finish their traverse over 10 days to the extraction point without knowing the fate of their partner [they did CPR until the Canadian SARtechs arrived] or whether they could have helped him. This would have made a horrible situation absolutely excruciating.

We live in a modern era where items like EPIRBs and SAT phones can save lives and effect a rescue quickly. This kind of gear should definitely be part of a bush pilot's emerge gear.
 
I don't understand the concern about a stuffed down bag loosing loft. I keep a down bag in my plane and it only gets unpacked a couple times a year. Twenty minutes after unpacking it's as fluffy as it ever was.
 
sutured said:
I don't understand the concern about a stuffed down bag loosing loft. I keep a down bag in my plane and it only gets unpacked a couple times a year. Twenty minutes after unpacking it's as fluffy as it ever was.
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It'll still loft-out, but it won't loft-out quite like it did when new, thus it's rating becomes less and less over time. This is precisely why the manufacturers always include a giant cotton stuff sac for storage. It's kind of the same principle as when you move a piece of furniture that's been sitting on carpet for a long time - the carpet loses it form from the long term compression. At the end of the day, having a slightly compromised sleeping bag is better than no bag at all. You might just want to let it loft-out for a couple of days when convenient.
 
ThriftyJoe said:
@redpoint: Not sure what the takeaway is from that incident. Maybe carry more than one emergency communications device if you're in a very remote area? A SPOT, sat phone, and/or PLB?
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What you take away from it is that they were smart to carry a SAT phone in such a remote place. I doubt many would given the weight, cost and unlikely utility. I have no idea whether or not bush pilots carry SAT phones and/or EPIRBS, but it should be required equipment first and foremost. If a plane goes down, it's unlikely that everyone will be uninjured which means the clock is ticking. Finding a downed plane in mountainous terrain or in the ocean can be next to impossible. Once you know a rescue is in the works, you can begin to survive.
 
ThriftyJoe said:
@sutured: The rule about storing your sleeping bags loose in an oversize sack for long term is not coming from me. Some say lay it flat, some say hang it up, and some say put it in a oversize sack, but it's universally agreed that you should get it out of its tight field stuff sack for long term storage:

http://www.mcnett-outdoor.com/repair-guide/sleeping-bags/221.aspx

http://www.wikihow.com/Maintain-a-Sleeping-Bag

If you don't have a big sack, I got a huge cotton laundry bag for cheap at Walmart. That works just fine.
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Thanks, ThriftyJoe,
I'm aware that it's better for the down to be stored uncompressed, and that's how I store the rest of my sleeping bags. But the degradation to loft really isn't that severe if you keep it in the factory sized stuff sack. Certainly not severe enough to worry about it becoming uneffective. At least that's been my experience with a North Face Blue Kazoo that's lived in my plane for over five years and probably only spends a couple dozen days a year outside the stuff sack. Of course, YMMV. I wash my down fairly frequently and I never, ever, ever put it in any sort of confined area for storage until I'm sure it's 100% dry.
 
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