Thread: For Those Who Have Used Your PLB

Im about to order my plb and I was just wondering, with all the hunters and yarns on the forum, how many of you have used your plb.

What was the situation?
How severe was it?
What was the thought process behind pushing the button as you had to ballance your situation vs the efforts, time, cost of the emergency services?

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I have
Saved my life
Status 2 on the hill
2.5 hours for the first chopper to arrive in appaling conditions
4.5 hours to get me on board and away to Franz
A full emergency medical team waiting there and another chopper to Grey base hospital
Well that's the short story

Originally Posted by akaroa1

I have
Saved my life
Status 2 on the hill
2.5 hours for the first chopper to arrive in appaling conditions
4.5 hours to get me on board and away to Franz
A full emergency medical team waiting there and another chopper to Grey base hospital
Well that's the short story

What did you do to earn the chopper trip? Looks like there was no walking out on that one.

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A tramping mate had a fall into a rocky creek in alpine snow last winter, 2 broken bones in her ankle. 7 hours from road end. She is a hospital nurse, who wanted to wait and assess herself (shock). We had no hesitation in pushing the button. whirlybird was on us in 1.25 hours. She was in surgery before we had tramped back to the nearest hut.

I fell 140m down a cliff
Multiple fractures
Both shoulders dislocated
Large flap torn off skull
Multiple lacerations

Stuck on small ledge
Friend cared for me until fog came in and then he had to walk the PLB to a ridge so they could find us
I spent 2 hours alone but awake.
We both had whistles so ever 10 minutes we whistled to each other so he knew I was conscious
It was a massive effort until the high altitude rescue team from Mt Cook arrived.

They climbed down to me
Stabilized my injuries
Long lined in a stretcher
Finally gave me 10 seconds of pain relief to put me in it.
Lifted me to the ridge on a 60m long line
Then put me inside the machine to go to Franz
My friend came out with me
Another machine went and got their two crew on the hill

Up on the ridge

Have pulled a PLB once.
2013, part of uni tramping club. Group of 6 of us in the Esperance River, near Milford Sound. Some poor decisions where made to cross a small side creek, the current swept the group downstream and resulted in injury and a bunch of very unhappy campers.
Set the beacon off and the injured person was taken out. The rest of us spent another night in and walked out the following day.

If you at the point of thinking you need to set the beacon off, then do it. In the bigger scheme, helicopters are cheaper than carrying an injury that's never healed quite right.

Then into the machine with my head at the pilots feet and looking straight up through the rotors



Then an emergency team in the Coal and Coast Rescue Helicopter waiting for me in Franz

Wheel you into a heated emergency room.
2 doctors
2 nurses and St John's

They all start on a different corner and just cut everything off you except your underpants
From then on you are just a casual observer of your own life
Things just are said and happen as if you were not in the room.

They finally mostly stopped the bleeding from my scalp.
Which I was relieved about, but that turned out to be the least of my worries.

I was in a group of 5 that went into Dale creek in 2019. 2 of us at Lower & 3 Upper. The heavens opened on the first night. The 3 at Upper got flooded. Spent most of the night sitting with water flowing through their trashed tent, set off PLB at 9am, chopper there 40 minutes later.

Originally Posted by akaroa1

Then into the machine with my head at the pilots feet and looking straight up through the rotors

Attachment 260894

Then an emergency team in the Coal and Coast Rescue Helicopter waiting for me in Franz

Wheel you into a heated emergency room.
2 doctors
2 nurses and St John's

They all start on a different corner and just cut everything off you except your underpants
From then on you are just a casual observer of your own life
Things just are said and happen as if you were not in the room.

They finally mostly stopped the bleeding from my scalp.
Which I was relieved about, but that turned out to be the least of my worries.

Bloody hell!

Originally Posted by akaroa1

Then into the machine with my head at the pilots feet and looking straight up through the rotors

Attachment 260894

Then an emergency team in the Coal and Coast Rescue Helicopter waiting for me in Franz

Wheel you into a heated emergency room.
2 doctors
2 nurses and St John's

They all start on a different corner and just cut everything off you except your underpants
From then on you are just a casual observer of your own life
Things just are said and happen as if you were not in the room.

They finally mostly stopped the bleeding from my scalp.
Which I was relieved about, but that turned out to be the least of my worries.

Soooo doesn't sound like the band aids and asprin were going to cut it

25 years ago I would have resisted pushing the button due to pride. Nowadays I would not have a single hesitation. 50 years of paying taxes: come pick me up

Spent a very cold winter night at Speargrass saddle keeping communication with RCC as nobody had a PLB and a guy had fallen on Angelus mountain. That was 20 years ago and he can still only manage to work for 3 hours a day due to injuries sustained. I bought my first PLB soon after and signed up with SAR.

Originally Posted by XR500

Soooo doesn't sound like the band aids and asprin were going to cut it

25 years ago I would have resisted pushing the button due to pride. Nowadays I would not have a single hesitation. 50 years of paying taxes: come pick me up

No pride lost in pushing that button.

I gave 26 years to the emergency services as a volunteer
It was time to be on the receiving end of volunteers and professionals.

The guy who climbed down to me first was not impressed with there I had ended up.

And no not a band aid job.
Over 2 years on ACC, 3 operations and countless assessments, treatments, physio and rehab.

Although I’ve never had cause to set off my own beacon, I’m one of the people that responds when you do. We can easily get a couple of beacons per shift in our high summer season so we’ve seen everything from simple panic and broken bones, to dead bodies. That’s the reason I often post on these beacon threads as I feel I have a bit of skin in the game to offer. Although there has been a historic poor understanding by the general public about what their beacons can and can’t do, this is getting better. Interestingly hunters seem to make up a noticeably low percentage of our beacon missions, I assume this is a mixture of stoicism, preparedness and high self reliance.

These two points so far are great takeaways.

Originally Posted by XR500

50 years of paying taxes: come pick me up

Originally Posted by Joe_90

In the bigger scheme, helicopters are cheaper than carrying an injury that's never healed quite right.

I would also add:
If you require help, do it a soon as you reach that decision. Helicopter minimas typically quadruple at night, so getting on location during daylight is far more reliable for you (and safer for us) than trying to do it at night if there is weather. There is a real witching hour leading into last light, often for emergencies that may have occurred in the afternoon.
On the flip side of that, some people will try and make far too many decisions on our behalf that delay help. An example, we picked up two extremely hypothermic trampers recently whom waited until first light before setting off their beacon. We could have gotten them off the hill hours earlier in the dark had we known, or gotten a Land SAR crew close to them had the front been still yet to pass. Also of note here, poor decision making and cold often go hand in hand in my experience. Hopefully neither of them has ongoing health problems from being so critically cold for so long, this relates to Joe_90 point above about living with your health outcomes from treatment delays.

I did 10 years of SAR work...but it was back in the 70's/mid 80's before beacons, civvie helicopters/dayglo vests/freeze dry rations etc etc. It was always Hueys to take us in and bring us and them out. Bloody impressive pilots too. Those that had had some lead thrown at them. And carting bodies or injured trampers/hunters down shitty rock jammed streambeds was diabolical. Minimum of 12 people needed, six to hold the stretcher and pass the parcel down the stream to another 6 guys.