A Case For 121.5

General Discussion Pilot Talk
21

Absolutely not! Not in the UK at least, under any circumstances.

22

Testing the ELT?

23

Practice PAN?

24

:rofl:
Anything is possible, but in my personal opinion, the odds on the first case being approved is about 1 in 10 million. Again in my personal opinion, the odds on the second case being approved ia about 1 in 10 billion. Based on those odds, I’m going to go buy a lottery ticket for the $735M USD lottery being picked tonight, as the odds of me winning that are likely better than either of those being approved, and certainly better than both being approved…

For 123.45, I would suspect VATSIM would simply say, for the one in a million use cases, use text or use Discord or similar.

For 121.5, there are at least a few dozen reasons for a “yeah, no”, but some of those include user maturity, supervisor availability, and the fact that we already have another frequency to accomplish that mission with the appropriate voice range restrictions to try to find the right balance between allowing proper coordination vs. being a nuisance.

1 Like
25

Either an ELT check (in which case you were not transmitting, only the device was, so your writeup is misleading), or you were ATC doing emergency transmitter checks. These seem much more common at military fields, but civilian facilities do them as well.

26

There is no valid reason to use 121.5 or 123.45. Necessary operational information can be exchanged on 122.8 by voice or text, or by direct text message. Non-operational information can be exchanged by direct text or some other method such as Discord.

27

Even when you’re transmitting on 121.5 with voice, it’s still the device that is transmitting. In both cases, the human is triggering the transmission. :smiley:

28

Many thanks to all posters who added to this thread. I appreciated your thoughts and direction. My whole purpose of this presentation was to make it “as real as it gets” and in alignment with real world procedures. Again, thanks! Oh, I almost forgot. Those who answered that I was checking ELT’s when transmitting on 121.5, give yourselves five stars. That was the correct answer. I would do this when conducting Annual Inspections on real airplanes. The times I did this were at the top of the hour until five minutes past the hour.

Regards, to all!
Ed Ward, Jr
AMT (A@P) 2076394 IA