Wrongo Goatrider. The market is too small for an aviation survival kit. You need a mass market item to get the ball rolling before you can branch out into the more specialized kits for aviation and marine use. I'm guessing it will be a kit for automobile use...large enough to enable a couple of people to survive a few days, but small enough to fit in the limited space of a small car or SUV. It will include an Aeromedix med kit and Ritter survival tools and items. It will sell like hotcakes, especially at Christmas and Doug will become very rich, but only after working a kazillion hours getting it to market. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Fair enough, that makes sense. But I think pilots are much more aware of the need for a survival kit, and are also more willing to spend money on it. So it's still feasible.

Another idea- a Ritter Multi-tool.

Maybe with a "D Ritter" engraved Mustache and beard clipper taking pride of place along side the other essential tools?
<img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

I agree with you there...I have spent close to $800 on my survival kit and it's not where I want it to be yet. I take survival very seriously because I fly coast and mountains of British Columbia...it's an unforgiving environment.

I am always surprised at how little most people put into their survival kits. Since I have assembled my kit, the thought has crossed my mind to put kits together for others, but it's a huge amount of work. My biggest concern right now is trying to find an inflatible life jacket type device for the survival kit so if we ditch we can toss the kit overboard along with ourselves. So far all I have come up with is a conventional inflatible lifejacket...if anyone knows of inflatibles for equipment, etc. please let me know. The kit weighs only 22 lbs. so it doesn't need a huge amount of floation.

Paula,

You're complicating it too much. Just get a dry-bag and don't squeeze all the air out of it. When we reviewed abandon ship bags for Practical Sailor, the truly waterproof dry bags would support an incredible amount of gear with no problem and no need to add extra flotation.

Paula,

Is there any way you could itemize what you have in your kit?

Thanks for that Doug. I'll take a look at your review of abandon ship bags. My only concern with dry bags is that I don't keep the survival gear in the airplane so it gets a lot of wear and tear being moved around. I was concerned that a dry bag may not stand up to the wear but then again I have no experience with dry bags. I just want to be sure that if I ever have to ditch...the survival stuff goes with me, rather than to the bottom of the sea.

I think Goatrider isn't "Wrongo".

Seeing as its the law for pilots to have a kit depending on circumstances, that sounds like a guaranteed market to me.

http://www.epcamps.com/deHavilland_Survival_Kit.html

Ecamps seem to do well enough selling such decent kits to law abiding pilots.

Flip

Hi Flipper,

Don't get me wrong...I think that survival kits for airplanes are vital. It's just that I know pilots, and I know that they generally aren't very concerned with survival because they spend very little time thinking about what the outcome of a crash or a ditching will be. Survival is not even covered in most ground schools and as a result most people just don't spend any time planning what to do, or what equipment they'll need after the crash happens.

I also think the aviation market is too small to build a survival based business on...sheesh, we can even keep flying schools afloat these days. But, as I said in my first post, once you build brand awareness for survival gear in a larger market i.e. the automobile market, you can then branch into the smaller niche markets.

Paula;

I know pilots too - in fact, I are one <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I have given talks on wilderness survival to a local chapter of an organisation of pilots that I used to belong to. One pilot did fall asleep during my lecture; otoh, that same pilot died a year later when the wing of his brand-new homebuilt glider collapsed during a steep turn to final on his third test flight (subsequent investigation revealed that he had tried to save weight by reducing the thickness of the wing spar).Other than that, the main complaint I had was that the demonstration survival kit (which I had put together myself, based purely on what I had read) was too bulky for most light planes; when I repeated the talk the next year, I had reduced the kit to the size of a Baggie sandwich bag.

Several pilots came up to me after the talk and inquired where I had bought my copy of Lofty Wiseman's "SAS Survival Guide"; some even wrote down the ISBN number.

Recently, a fellow pilot and co-worker who had agreed to ferry a new homebuilt plane across Canada came to me and asked if I had a small survival kit that he could borrow. Granted, he normally flew without one, but he realised that he would be flying for extended periods over remote areas in a relatively unproven airplane.

Many, if not most, pilots do think about what could go wrong. You're right, this almost always extends only as far as landing the plane safely; surviving a night in the open in the same bad weather that forced you to land does receive remarkably short shrift. (But the same goes for most outdoor activities; I've only read two stories in Backpacker magazine dealing with outdoor survival, and neither of them contained what I would consider useful information.)

Perhaps we should try lobbying Transport Canada and the FAA to make wilderness survival training mandatory for all licensed pilots; after all, it is the pilot's responsibility to care for his/her passengers, even after the forced landing.