When I was first shopping for an airplane, I had my eye on a nice Piper Warrior at the flight school where I had done my primary. The ELT "saved" me from buying it.

A student had a very hard landing that set off the ELT, which basically forced an inspection. It had a prop strike and bent metal. HARD PASS.

IMO, most of the bad rep for ELTs was about the 121.5/243 MHz variety which had insufficient mounting requirements, unreliable activation and much more limited location detection. AFaIK, modern 406 MHz ELTs with GPS derived position data have had a much better success rate.

If you can wait until next month, I have an ACK-01 I will give you. It's in my plane right now and it will be removed for replacement in March. Will also include the antenna.

Early 90s when I was a backseater in B1s, pilots were beating up night approaches in Grand Forks ND. I started hearing a beacon on 243.0 that would fade in and out on radar downwind. We didn't have DF, so I plotted the in/out points to arrive at a rough location of beacon, which we had passed off to stare police. Troopers found a twin in a field that had force landed due to fuel starvation. Not sure if it was a save. Guy was sitting on wing in the dark. Would have been a cold night though.

I always run Guard on #2 and have heard and reported many UHF and VHF beacons in the 30+ years since, but no saves and to my knowledge none were even legit.

My friend crashed an A36 prompting the Aileron cable AD, the plane had a brand new 406 ELT, this plane went in hard through the trees ripped the wings off and ended upside down. The elt never went off.
But I need one too for a project I just finished, the old one crumbled apart when we went to put the dcells in it.

My list of ELT "saves" is surprisingly long. I became a convert very early in my career when a man limped into the avionics shop carrying a pail of water. In the bottom of the pail was an unrecognizable charred lump; it was the Narco ELT10 which had saved his life in a helicopter crash. That was the first of quite a few, including one of my own when a cylinder went out through the side of the engine cowl in a C206.

The idea that ELT's don't work is, frankly, an idea which has been very thoroughly debunked. It's time to move on.

Yeah, we found several aircraft and rotary wing crashes with our handheld Ltronics Yagi style leading us to the crash, eventually. We also had a ton of bastard search call outs from tripped ELTs…rough handlings, rough loading and tow bars tossed in the back of tow planes(most common). I don’t recall anyone saved because of them guiding us in, but there’s not that many survivors anyhow.

The advantage was that many SAR teams had these field units and could easily train to get the basics of triangulation.

A frequent problem was the ELTs were destroyed in the crash(impact on mass of battery packs pretty big), torn or detected coax cables, snapped or rotationally deformed/positioned antenna and fire destroyed units. Failure to train with a detection device was an issue too.

Finding a wreck, even though fatal, was a big deal. Keeping people in the field on an operation posed its own challenges, logistic to risk exposure.

I’d bet 121.5/243 units from salvage yards are very cheap.

Many don’t know that an increasingly detuned(off frequency)handheld will pick up the signal and walk you in as you get close…easy to identify the culprit aircraft by walking down a flight line or get you in while in a cluttered or rugged environment.