Thanks for the suggestion.
We're already looking at the strobe illuminated version. The plain non-illuminated streamer won't add much more visibility from the air as the bright orange canopy on our 25-person rafts already is fairly easy to find. Our 50-person Mark-8 life raft even more so.

Rescue Streamer has a newer streamer with an LED illuminated light baton that will automatically activate at night and turn-off during the day. It's very bright and flashes SOS in Morse code. It's a pretty cool rig, definitely worthy of consideration.

The plain streamer is more effective on small life rafts which have little visible footprint on the ocean surface.

When my FY08 funding for our signal test program arrives, we will be testing a variety of strobes and other signals to try and establish some baseline performance data to help us determine what criteria should be used to select candidate devices.

Regards,

Tom