The only uninhabited island I have a risk of landing on is the Calf of Man. No phone signal there, but easy line of sight to Ronaldsway Radar’s antenna, so I’d just give ’em a call :-)
If you didn’t crash your plane in the landing, you’ve got shelter sorted already. I have a PLB (which on water crossings, I attach to myself) which should work anywhere. There’s also the aircraft’s VHF radio and my portable one – so if you’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s likely a passing airliner you can call. My handheld has a scan function, so even if I don’t have the frequencies, if I leave it scanning for a while I’ll eventually find one.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
If the battery is still good you might get a pretty good spark off it,
Reminds me of a rather horrible accident in Sweden in the 1960-70s. An light aircraft flying over one of the vast forest areas in northern Sweden had an engine failure. All four occupants survived, but they were dozens of miles from any civilisation and could just as well have been on an uninhabited island. It was in the middle of winter and they had no survival equipment. It took two weeks to find them and by that time of course they had all frozen to death.
They actually did try lighting a fire with fuel and the ignition system of the aircraft, but failed.
You should get e bigger bang for your buck off the main battery!
Just a little stuffing from the seat, some clothing or the headling – of course the seat prob 90 wont work as it will have been treared with fire retardant of course (well maybe 
).
Of course it could be one good reason not to fly in fire retardant boiler suits either.
Contact SAR using Garmin Inreach
This video convinced me to buy one…
That’s where an ELT proves its value.
In a flightchops video, a helicopter guy tells how landed as usual on a mountain top in BC and couldn’t start the heli again. They switched on the ELT and waited. 45 minutes later, the cavalry eh a SAR heli appeared.
An ELT continuously transmitting in a maritime region has to be on an island, so the search phase should be quick.
It’s a far better situation than ditching IMO.
OK; clearly an ELT makes this challenge trivial.
But say you don’t have that, and don’t have Golze ADL, etc. How would you try to survive, and attract attention?
I carry two cheap sleeping bags, but don’t carry a tent. A good tent can be found under 2kg but the plane itself should do, assuming it hasn’t caught fire post-landing in which case there will be nothing left of it.
Peter wrote:
carry two cheap sleeping bags, but don’t carry a tent. A good tent can be found under 2kg but the plane itself should do, assuming it hasn’t caught fire post-landing in which case there will be nothing left of it.
Again depending on where this island is (in terms of climate): Both a tent and the plane have the disadvantage that you can’t heat them by making a fire. Therefore if you are in very cold environment you still need to find another shelter.
As written before: Although we might have seen lots of survival stuff on TV or read about it, I doubt that without very significant training any of us would survive such a Robinson Crusoe Scenario for more than a week (if at all).
Yes; the TV survival game shows are all rigged. Like all the “backpack travel” programmes where the presenter has a team in 4×4s and puts his backpack on just for the camera.
A sleeping bag should work if you are able to use the plane as a shelter.
AIUI the priority is: shelter, water, and food. I guess it is obvious that they will depend on where you ended up.
Assuming there is a reasonable tidal range, rocky tidal zones are very productive and there is very little that isnt safe to eat
Is that true? These “animals”, served cold, seem to be prime candidates for getting severe food poisoning in fashionable restaurants, as I know only too well…
All round the Australian coastline just behind every beach, when I was a kid you could find “middens”. These piles, covered with drifting sand and sometimes a couple of metres high and many metres wide, are composed of the remains of shellfish which the aborigines ate. They have only been there for 50,000 plus years, so not clear if that is a safe source of food!
More serioulsy, if I thought I was going to be there for a while (ie weeks, months), I would be thinking hard about what could be used from the plane. Glass to make reflectors (perhaos the emergency exit would be good for this) and lenses for fire making (glass from the compass), aluminium pieces that could be fashioned into cooking vessels (Cirrus useless for this purpose), Cirrus chute to make a tent though. Remaining fuel to start fires with a spark. I don’t think an aircraft fuselage necessarily makes a very good shelter, due to limited thermal insulation, but a wing might make a good sun shelter. And the seats etc could be adapted to make a good bed in my cave/tent.
For whiling away the hours, I would finally get to read the POH from cover to cover.
I would ask a guy named Friday, who would venture along, to help me build some shelter and wait a couple of years for help.
Or I would wait for that large studio light crashing down close to me.
