Originally Posted By: Susan
Some of their people can't tell the difference between north and south of the same city.

Had that - especially a problem in cities where West-TOWN may be 10miles from TOWN, or A street W and A street E may be miles apart and you just get the message TOWN.

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

Understandable in small ATC, their main job is to land their planes. Passing on info from other agencies to other agencies isn't the priority. Most small ATC don't have spare staff to hand this off to.
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General location? These ELTs only provide general information?

The older 121MHz did, there shouldn't be any left, but this may be old info.

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it's a crapshoot whether or not it will be made available to local responders to assist in the search.

Always true when you have multiple agencies working together.
"Security" makes it worse, we now have a lot of radio systems that can't interoperate because everybody got new secure digital systems in the great terrorism sales event - and of course you can't let civilians mountain rescue have access to airforce radio codes, who can't have coastguard codes....

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Here's a suggestion: USE REGULAR ENGLISH, such as "flashing emergency locator beacon six miles south of Atlanta"?

Sorry - plain english is the last thing you want. That's why we have spent nearly a century creating standard phrases for radio, ships and now planes.

eg. flashing emergency locator beacon six miles south of Atlanta"

flashing = do you mean triggered or intermittently failing?

locator beacon = do you mean a PLB or the airports ILS locator?

6mi south Atlanta = south of the airport (which may be 6miles north of the city) or south of the city?
Do you mean the city center as reported by google maps, in which case 6mi south is probably in a suburban mall. Or 6mi south of the edge of the built up area?

There are areas here where we have to worry about NAD83 or CONUS27, rescue helos want lat/lon DMS, planes want Deg.mmmmm, the mountain rescue want map grid.