Thank you, AkSAR! I appreciate your extensive post, but I am surprised that there are no SAR stats available. How busy is this place? A call every hour/ every three minutes? And no tracking of outcomes? I suspect that would b a good selling point.
I'm sure there are statistics, I'm just not aware of how to find them. Garmin does have a blog called
Saved by Garmin. In a post from last year they were claiming more than 6,000 successful rescues due to InReach. If those numbers are just from since Garmin acquired InReach in 2016, that would average out to about 1000 successful missions per year.
yet I doubt that your black box, whatever iteration, is absolute security. Glitches can occur an delays may happen. I suspect that a lot of people depend on their black boxes to bail them out, when really the first source of aid is within their group and its resources. Help from outside may come faster than before, but it still isn't immediate, and bad outcomes are still possible.
Obviously, no device can guarantee you will have absolute security. For all the reasons you cite. An InReach can increase your odds of surviving, but stuff happens.
Based on my experience in the NPS, if this were a govment operation, there would be stats up the gazoo
As I noted above, there probably are statistics, I just don't have access to them. Keep in mind that Garmin is a private, for profit operation. Unlike the NPS, FOIA doesn't apply, and they don't have to release any data. That being said, the general sense I get is that the system works quite well.
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