The costs involved in S&R are greatly reduced if you can minimize the "S". With a good PLB GPS location, manpower and flight hour requirements can be reduced but more importantly lives can be saved. But this requires the rescue-ees to cooperate with potential rescuers and actually carry a GPS enabled PLB. Without that cooperation, I start to edge over to Susan's side of the discussion.

I don't know how things are in Oregon, but many States are having serious budget issues and while no one wants to cut S&R budgets, what are we getting for those dollars? Dagny's idea that helo flight hours can be written off as training only goes so far; training budgets are limited. Flight hours run in the thousands of dollars per hour, while a PLB costs a few hundred and is good for years.

A PLB can minimize search requirements within its limitations, but the alternative is what we're seeing on Mt Hood. With a GPS fix you can fly a team in to do a localized ground search -- a 100' CEP is much better than "somewhere above 9000' on the west side". Rather than "we're waiting for a break in the weather so we can start an air search", it could be, "we're waiting for a break in the weather so we can fly a team in and pull them off the mountain".

That about sums it up for me. If the only break in the weather is spent on (unsuccessful) search when it could used for rescue, everyone loses. Days later -- we're still here and they are still on Mt Hood.