Several good comments there. Maybe the S&R team was just saying that they were frustrated because bad weather would not let thm go on the mountain. That would make sense.

A beacon would have helped for several reasons:

1. If the climbers knew they had a beacon, then there was no necessity to send a team member to reach the outside world. That was particularly risky ... descents off mountains in bad weather often claim the lives - even for the best climbers.

2. The beacon would cut S&R costs, and total search time, tremendously.

3. In a worst-case scenario, yes the beacon becomes a body locator. But that still brings closure to the families.

However, this raises a question in my mind.
Are these PLB's designed so that you must manually turn ON the emergency signal? If that's the case, and you happen to be killed by a sudden accident while travelling in the wilderness, then the beacon can never activated. Hence no signal, and no body recovery.

It would be smart for these devices to have a special "countdown mode" as one possible option. You set the electronics working (but not broadcasting a distress signal), and then you activate a clock so that it will automatically send a distress in 12 hours - unless you intervene and say things are OK. That way if you are killed outright, the unit still turns on later and somebody can recover your body. This idea could generate some false alerts. But it would allow bodies to be found much more quickly.

other Pete