What I got from the link of the letter from the National Transportation Safety Board wasn't all that encouraging:

Some of their people can't tell the difference between north and south of the same city.

If an air traffic manager calls the Air Force Center and says they've got a flashing emergency locator beacon NORTH of the city, it may be lumped together with all incidents happening in the general area at the time.

Air Traffic Control can report a suspected crash with erroneous location info, promise to send radar data ASAP, and apparently forget to do it.

Even if a plane goes down on a GOLF COURSE, air searchers may be only able to determine the general location of the ELT signal. General location? These ELTs only provide general information?

Following some accidents, ground searchers are provided with conflicting and inaccurate information on the aircraft's last known position:

* Just because air traffic control HAS the radar info, it's a crapshoot whether or not it will be made available to local responders to assist in the search.

* Some airports lack qualified personnel to provide the needed data, so even if it's available, searchers can't have it.

* An automation tool called CountOps can produce the last known latitude and longitude position of an aircraft immediately, but since some of the controllers haven't been trained on that feature, it's useless.

And then they say some of the problems are caused by "the lack of standard phraseology" Are all these traffic managers using too many acronyms? Too many weasel words? Here's a suggestion: USE REGULAR ENGLISH, such as "flashing emergency locator beacon six miles south of Atlanta"?

When you use a form of corporate-speak, with all the clear meaning sucked out, in a situation with people's lives at stake, it's a totally insane situation.

No ELBs are going to fix stupid. If your ELB works, but it takes days to find you and you're dead, can you get your money back?

Sue