Missing Sailboat

[Cap Erict3]

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?se...cal&id=9376123

Does anyone have further info on this?

[bstreep]

Nope. Last contact was reported to be Sunday morning. Don't know either of them. Winds were reported to be very calm until Sunday am.

[Pirate999]

They are back in port Aransas.

Boaters who went missing off Texas coast return to port safe | khou.com Houston

[Ocean Girl]

How long were they over due? I couldn't find that info.

[HappyMdRSailor]

What a huge waste of resources....

[natew]

Originally Posted by HappyMdRSailor

What a huge waste of resources....

How so? The boat had to be towed back still, meaning it was not necessarily fit to make the journey home. Maybe leaving with a bad engine was not too smart on their part.. But, they were outside of their reported schedule, beyond radio contact distance (apparently) and no one knew why they were taking so long and there were fairly rough seas. The boat could have just as easily been over turned floating in the gulf somewhere, or missing the mast and stuck with no engine adrift.

Sure, the people were OK but I would certainly rather waste some resources occasionally on people who are ok than have people out there dying because we decided it wasn't worth the resources to start looking yet.

Without water you can survive for 3 days. They already waited a day beyond the scheduled arrival to begin searching, that leaves two days to search a massive area. I think the average search/recovery time over the ocean is somewhere between 2-5 days. Would you suggest waiting another day? Meaning that IF they were in trouble by the time you found them they could very well already be dead?

And let's be honest.. How much do you actually believe those $100,000+ figures? $100K for a day of searching? My guess is that they include salaries and pay for the S&R and coast guard personnel. But, we are paying them anyways.. Whether they are out searching for people or back home waxing and cleaning the equipment. Which means you really only have some fuel costs and maintenance/wear on the equipment. I really doubt a small S&R operation like that can burn $100,000 in fuel in a day.

[Ocean Girl]

Well, they (CG) are out there a lot doing maneuvers, I wonder if it wasn't too far out of there way.
My parents were over due from a gulf crossing. After, I think 4-5 days overdue, I called the CG. They plotted my parents track and took weather in account and told me to wait another few days. I thought I'd already waited long enough but I was up north, and this was before I discovered the internet so I was flying blind with what the gulf was offering up, storms? Calms? They had circumnavigated in that boat but that really wasn't a comfort. When your loved one is overdue all sorts of ideas pop in your head, for me it was the forward head thru hull. I thought abouts it's age, when the last time my dad serviced it etc. As it turns out, my parents had been becalmed, they don't really motor much unless close to a landfall.
The coast guard was fantastic in evaluating my parents situation, something in this current situation must of concerned them enough to take action.

[btrayfors]

Originally Posted by natew

........

And let's be honest.. How much do you actually believe those $100,000+ figures? $100K for a day of searching? My guess is that they include salaries and pay for the S&R and coast guard personnel. But, we are paying them anyways.. Whether they are out searching for people or back home waxing and cleaning the equipment. Which means you really only have some fuel costs and maintenance/wear on the equipment. I really doubt a small S&R operation like that can burn $100,000 in fuel in a day.

Well, let's start with the $17 million HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, mainstay of the USCG's SAR fleet.

It carries a crew of four, and costs $10,719 per hour to operate. It has an endurance of 6-7 hours, so that...alone....is $64,000 or more. For a single helicopter. For only six hours flight time.

Don't underestimate either the real costs of such SAR operations, or the skill level of the highly-trained crews involved.

Bill

[natew]

Originally Posted by btrayfors

Well, let's start with the $17 million HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, mainstay of the USCG's SAR fleet.

It carries a crew of four, and costs $10,719 per hour to operate. It has an endurance of 6-7 hours, so that...alone....is $64,000 or more. For a single helicopter. For only six hours flight time.

Don't underestimate either the real costs of such SAR operations, or the skill level of the highly-trained crews involved.

Bill

How though? I am really curious as it seems numbers like this come from nowhere and you know how much the media likes to exaggerate realities. And i'm not discounting the training or value of the crew, just that we pay them basically the same whether they are out on an S&R operation or back home and should not necessarily be included in the cost of a particular S&R operation.

[btrayfors]

Originally Posted by natew

How though? I am really curious as it seems numbers like this come from nowhere and you know how much the media likes to exaggerate realities. And i'm not discounting the training or value of the crew, just that we pay them basically the same whether they are out on an S&R operation or back home and should not necessarily be included in the cost of a particular S&R operation.

You're certainly right in saying that some of the costs would be incurred even if there were no active SAR mission. However, when multiple aircraft are deployed for long periods of time on a real SAR mission additional costs are involved. How much? Hard to say.

Let's assume that only two Jayhawks were used. One flew two missions for a total of 10 hours flight time. The second flew only one mission, totaling only 5 hours. That's 15 hours @ $10,719 or $160,785.

Would these choppers, absent the real SAR mission, have flown for 15 hours on these days? For 10 hours? For 5 hours? Not at all?

Obviously it's a difficult calculation to make, but the bottom line is easy to see: REAL SAR MISSIONS COST REAL MONEY, over and above the normal operational-training-readiness costs.

BTW, if these young "experienced sailors" had thought to bring a VHF radio along, or a rented SatPhone, or a reliable engine they might have avoided all the grief from their families and the costs of the SAR mission.

Bill

[denverd0n]

Originally Posted by btrayfors

That's 15 hours @ $10,719

I think his question, though, is where does that $10,719 figure come from? Surely the helicopter isn't burning that much fuel every hour. Add in routine maintenance, oil changes, a factor for eventual engine replacement/rebuild, and then does it get to $10k/hour? Maybe, but like natew I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of what that $10k/hour includes.

[btrayfors]

Originally Posted by denverd0n

I think his question, though, is where does that $10,719 figure come from? Surely the helicopter isn't burning that much fuel every hour. Add in routine maintenance, oil changes, a factor for eventual engine replacement/rebuild, and then does it get to $10k/hour? Maybe, but like natew I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of what that $10k/hour includes.

Hint: Begin with the $17,000,000 acquisition cost, amortized by operational hours over its lifetime.

B.

[s/v 'Faith']

That is a very good question. USCG, and the military are "single payer" systems. Unlike a free market endeavor, they exist in a vacuum with regard to income.

One helicopter is not just a device that uses fuel operated by a rained crew,.,. It is part of a system. It requires not only support personnel, but those support personnel require support. When you look at a government expenditure, you look at the cost of the entire enterprise.

Maintenance costs have been decreasing, as maintenance is contracted out to the private sector but is still very very expensive.

Unlike many other things in the world, that airframe has got to work nearly perfectly every time it flys and the crews who serve aboard her bank their lives on it being so.

So, if you take the hours flown and decide them by the sum of every cost for all parts, rework, maintenance, fuel, EVERYTHING.... You determine a per hour charge for the airframe. Add crew costs to that (a drop, a very very small drop) and you get the published number.

I would be astounded if the numbers were as low as were published. I saw the study for the F-14D+ program shortly before it was retired... Granted that was a maintenance intensive aircraft, but it was very close to to $50,000 an hour!

[captain58sailin]

The maintenance costs on those choppers is horrendous. It isn't like they can just drop the oil, change filters, and put in a new set of spark plugs, and we're all good.

[natew]

I see.. But those are still fixed expenses whether you use it or not. Amortization is an accounting trick to represent value and to make things seem not as expensive as they are on the books as well as a way of basically lending yourself money. Yes, the equipment has a fixed lifespan but we are going to still purchase it and it will still be there if it is used or not, and if that helicopter is NEVER used it STILL cost us $17Million. Those numbers are really only import in an overall budget situation, and in a government scenario only really important to overall taxpayer decisions about whether to spend or not. IF we were talking about whether or not it is prudent to spend tax dollars on a SAR helicopter then yes, it might be valulable to say that they cost about $10,000/HR. But, as a tax payer I can tell you I see the value beyond the numbers and thefore have no interest in try to make a case that we should not buy that helicopter even if it is not used.

What I am interested in understanding is what ADDITIONAL cost was incurred because of that SAR operation? What does maintenance cost? What is the maintenance interval? What does fuel cost? How much fuel is consumed? What other CONSUMABLE resources were used in that operation?

ie.. (completely making stuff up) If a typical full maintenance cycle is say $20,000 and that is good for say 100 hours of operation then you can say that it is $200/hr worth of maintenance and if it consumes 10 gallons of fuel an hour at say $10/gallon then it is an extra $100 in fuel so you get a grand total of $300/hr for just operation costs. So an hour of searching then costs $300 additional taxpayer dollars.