Thanks for the welcome!

Sue, you can think about an airplane having 2 speeds that need to be dealt with.

First is airspeed, ie the speed of the air across the wings of the aircraft, and it's the speed that determines if you can fly or not.

Secondly is ground speed, which is just as it sounds the speed which you are going across the ground, and it's the speed that determines how quickly/slowly you get to where you are going.

For example, if you are in a small slow airplane like a Cessna 172 which can fly around 40ish kts or so with flaps extended, you can point that airplane into a 40 kt headwind, thus retaining your airspeed but your ground speed will be 0, so your effectively hovering in a static position over the ground because you have no ground speed.

So that's the long way of answering that yes you will burn more fuel when flying into the prevailing wind, when compared to a no wind situation.

Edit: But you can calculate your ground speed, from airspeed and knowing the wind speed, or if you're lazy look at your GPS. However winds aloft are forecasted, and sometimes they're higher than expected, and sometimes slower.
You make the plan as best you can, with acceptable margins of safety, for some that's legal mins, for other's it much, much more. But in the end you have to see what's actually happening once you get airborne and make adjustments accordingly. However once you're over the ocean, your options become very limited. [End Edit]



I agree that some folks that put themselves into a bad situation wouldn't need rescuing if they had thought a bit about what they were doing, however I feel they do deserve to be helped if it's available without the fear of going into bankruptcy.

It wasn't so much discussed in this thread until I brought it up, however this mentality seems like it's gaining traction from what I've heard/read/seen from friends, TV, etc... and I find it troubling. Of course I'm not condoning that SAR folks go beyond reasonable risks to save somebody who's gotten themselves into trouble, but I'll leave that risk calculation to those who know more than me.