ELT

After months of negotiations I received the contract to move government helicopters between Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The first one I moved was from Vancouver to Ottawa and I had to devise a way to protect it from road salt and flying debris. I wrapped it in plastic.

I drove over the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia and Alberta, across the prairies of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, then around the great lakes of Ontario to a city called Sault Ste. Marie. I ate at a local restaurant and ended up with a touch of food poisoning, so I went to sleep in the truck. I'd been driving for about an hour the next day when I hit something in the road.[I will tell you what, later]

Soon after I noticed a search and rescue aircraft flying in my vicinity then a search and rescue helicopter. I presumed that an aircraft had crashed and the search and rescue were looking for it. I kept a sharp look out for any smoke or fire from a crash site but didn't see anything. I arrived in the outskirts of Sudbury, Ontario five hours later and stopped to eat a good meal. I had just sat down when I noticed two police cars around my truck. I went outside to investigate.

The police questioned me about where I had come from and who owned the helicopter. I told them what they wanted to know and they then asked to be let inside the helicopter. I cut the wrapping around the door and opened it. They told me they wanted to look at the E.L.T. I reached in and unhooked it from the wall. E.L.T. stands for Emergency Locater Transmitter; it is a small orange box with a three-way safety on/off switch to transmit a signal upon impact. Large aircrafts also have so-called ‘black boxes'. Apparently, when I hit something in the road, a large pothole, it caused the E.L.T. to go off and trigger an emergency signal that an aircraft had crashed. That's why the search and rescue aircraft were flying around, they were searching for a downed aircraft.

They noticed on their radar that the crash site was not stationary but moving. They believed it was the helicopter I was hauling, and had put up a roadblock to stop me in Sudbury, but I stopped just before Sudbury, so they came looking for me. I turned off the E.L.T. and everything was fine. I delivered the helicopter but later on heard a rumor that there was a $10,000 dollar fine to the owner (the government) for falsely activating the E.L.T. The fine was withdrawn as the government would only take the money out of one hand and put it in the other. From this experience I made a note to turn off all E.L.T.'s before transporting any other aircraft.

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Created 18 February 2002		Last Updated 4 September 2006 19:20