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| Thanks! |
| -J.T. |
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In 1993, he conducted the first ever comparitive test of different brands and models of marine and aviation emergency life rafts. What he found in his independent comparison dismayed him. In his opinion, all rafts tested failed to meet Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) specs.
Fortunately, and most probably because of Doug's continued efforts, the industry has responded. In 1996, Doug conducted the second ever test and found that, while some companies had changed their product not a whit, others had made improvements and one had simply come to dominate the field with the finest rafts made.
When Doug conducted his third such test in 2000, he found that quite a number of companies had moved to improve their products, possibly in an attempt to keep up with the single frontrunner. He also found that, instead of sitting on their laurels, the top-rated company had incorporated many of his suggestions from the second test, and their rafts had only become even better than before.
Think about this man and his work the next time you or anyone you love
flies in an airplane over any body of water.
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And that's when I discovered Doug Ritter.
I stumbled upon his excellent and multiple award winning website, Equipped To Survive, and quickly read everything he had written there, including the results of his 1996 Life Raft Test. Later, after he posted the 2000 results, I read those too.
I have been an active participant on The Survival Forum, also hosted on Doug's website, for over two years now. Far from the normal "survivalist" mentality I have found on many other such sites, this forum is populated by the most polite group of level-headed, well-prepared and responsible people I have ever met online.
So, when Doug posted he was doing another Life Raft Test ...
... well, I just had to ...
We all came to Tempe, Arizona, to the indoor wave pool at the Kiwanis
Family Recreation Center there, and spent three days with Doug & Sue,
getting very very wet.
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Well, I'm glad you asked that question ...
Above right, here, is a picture of a raft in the water. It is designed to handle four people. As you can see, it does, indeed, keep four large adults out of the water, as it is supposed to.
This is important, this whole "staying out of the water"
thing. In fact, after breathing, it's the most
important thing. Your Personal Flotation Device (PFD) can keep you from
drowning, but ocean water will still suck the heat from your body.
(Statistically, most people easily survive emergency water landings
and exit the downed airplane intact. Many then drown. Many more then
die from exposure and hypothermia, something that can take mere
minutes in cold water.)
But, here is a picture of another raft, this time up on jacks for display. It also is designed to handle four people and does so quite well. But, it has nice large ballast bags underneath, to fill with water and help keep the raft from flipping over in stormy seas, a second flotation tube, in case one of them develops a leak, and a self-erecting arch with canopy, to keep those stormy seas ... and rains ... outside, where they belong.
Which one would you rather be stuck waiting in, perhaps for hours or more, until SAR can arrive?
And that's a part of what we were testing; which ones we would prefer
to be stuck in, if ever we were forced to. Doug was testing far more
than just that, though. He was comparing the various rafts against
FAA and
SOLAS Treaty (Safety
Of Life At Sea) regulations and specifications, to see how well these
pieces of life-saving equipment lived up to the rules. (If you're
curious about how these rafts have done in tests past, please check
out Doug's Aviation
Life Raft Reviews on his website.)
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All of the rafts tested were designed to be carried for years onboard planes and ships, with occasional inspection, repacking and supply replenishment, and likely never used in a real emergency. They are incredibly compact, in my opinion, in hard or soft sided valises, looking something like white, yellow, orange or red colored suitcases or duffle bags.
TIP:
If you ever have to deploy one of these, don't try to open
the container. They are not supposed to be opened manually,
and doing so can waste time or worse.
One woman actually managed to rip hers apart to such a degree
that she disabled the inflation mechanism! 
One man, taking an entirely different tack, simply threw the entire
package into the pool. (SPLASH!) I guess he expected it
to inflate automatically. Even if it had, wind can blow one of these
babies far away much faster than it is possible to swim after it. If
it's in a storm, strong winds could keep it skipping over the water
for some time before the ballast bags finally dipped into the water
long enough to fill and create some stability. By then, there
would simply be no way anyone could ever catch it. "Bye bye,
raft." 
Instead, each raft will have, somewhere on the exterior, some sort of
cord or rope with some sort of clip or hook on the end of it. Pull
that line out far enough to attach that hook solidly to some part of
the plane. Then throw the raft out. Then start pulling the
line. After 20 or 30 feet of line pull out of the raft, it will
activate the inflation mechanism, and the raft, firmly attached by
the line to the plane, will deploy. Pull on the line until the raft
is up next to the plane and step in, or, if that's not possible,
pull the raft as near as you can, jump in the water and swim to
it. Most (unfortunately, not all) of these tether lines will
guide you directly to the main boarding area of the raft.
So, after someone has gotten a raft deployed ...
Doug pulls it out into the pool ...
the appropriate number of "Raft Rats" (that's us) jump in ...
we wait until the wave pool gets going full power ...
and then, we try climbing in ...
and closing up the canopy.
Some canopies you have to assemble and erect yourself.
Some erect themselves automatically ...
and, then, you can close them up if you need to.
"Pay no attention to the man on the ladder with the ... fire hose!?"
So, how well would that canopy hold up in a real storm?
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Some of them quite well ...
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... and some of them not quite so well.
We had some pretty good waves out there.
And, of course, we have to flip them over ...
so we can see how easy they are to right.
This is how it's supposed to work.
These Coast Guard guys make it look so easy!
Check out those waves!
See how high this raft seems to be riding out of the water?
It needs to! This is just the wave I caught with my camera.
I didn't get a good shot here of how high these waves were actually
going.
A well made raft can be very stable, even when you're trying to tip it
over ...
but any raft can be tipped over if you work at it hard enough!
Did I mention the waves? I mentioned the waves, right? We had some really cool waves!
Compare these two shots.
Check out how this raft was just lifted out of the water by the wave action! This isn't a small four person raft, either. I don't remember if this is an eight or ten person raft, but it's big! And the only things keeping it down at this moment are the ballast bags! Imagine being inside that puppy! That beats the amusement park, I'll tell you!
At least, until the seasickness begins to set in ...
There were some interesting designs. This one has the floor
between the two inflatable tubes, so either side
can be "up" or "down". It never needs righting.
Others, like this one, just wouldn't flip over completely, no matter
what we tried. Righting them was almost too easy. It was hard
enough to keep them balancing over on their side at all! We really
couldn't get it to continue on over. Weird, but cool.
This is a "normal" load. It's a four person raft with four people
in it. What I don't have is a good picture of the "overload" test.
Aviation rafts have to be able to perform properly with 50% again as
many people as they are rated for. That means we had to stuff two
more people in this raft! Crowded!
So, this six person raft had to also be tested with nine people crammed into it!
(We all got to know each other fairly well. But, at least this one
had some pretty nice headroom... some did not!)
To assist SAR in finding the raft, when looking down from searchplanes, many canopies are adorned with retro-reflective tape.
Here's a normal picture I took, with just natural light.
Here's a picture of the same raft, taken just a moment later in the same lighting, but with the addition of the camera's flash.
Pretty big difference. Cool, yeah?
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While I'm discussing canopies, I'll share something I rediscovered
about myself in whole new ways. When inside a raft that is overloaded
with 50% more people than it's supposed to carry, being tossed about
and becoming seasick by unceasing waves, with the canopy closed and
almost no ventilation to cool us against the exhaled hot breath
of a half dozen or so other people, I get just a teensy bit
claustrophobic. 
In this condition, I discovered two amazingly simple things that helped more than I ever would have thought:
If you're ever buying a raft, I have two recommendations to make:
1. Blue. 2. Windows.
Spend the money!
(Before I go on, take just a moment to locate the clear plastic
collapsible bailing bucket sitting in the small inflatable boarding
ramp in front of the raft above. It is attached via lanyard -- very
important -- to the raft. Most of the rafts had something like
this. I'll mention this again in a moment.)
Note the boarding ramp in the fronts of the rafts in the colored
picture above and the one to the right. This was fairly common on
many of these rafts. Some worked very well. Some sucked, because
they weren't executed well. You can't see it in the picture above,
but out that window in the back left is a boarding ladder made
of nylon webbing. That was also common. Some worked well, some
sucked, mostly depending on how long it was (whether it fell down into
the water far & deep enough that your feet could easily find a rung
for you to stand on), and also largely depending on whether there was
some sort of handle on the inside of the raft to grab hold of
and haul yourself inside over the tube wall.
This raft in the images to the right also had a boarding ramp on
one side and a boarding ladder on the other. At first, I didn't like
the ramps, but, after experiencing both good and bad ramps
and ladders, I now wonder if including both options, like this
raft does, may not be the best philosophy. If one of these methods
just doesn't work for someone, perhaps the other will.
Here's a great assist to getting into these things. Some of the rafts
are equipped with a ladder inside as well as outside. These
are great! They make getting in so much easier! Once everyone
is in, quick-release buckles allow you to detach it so it doesn't take
up needed space all over the middle of your limited area. (Another
good idea in a space so seriously confined!)
Remember I mentioned lanyards? Everything you want to keep must be tethered to the raft. In a pool, we can jump down and scoop it up off the bottom. Have you ever tried to swim down to the bottom of the ocean to pick up something you dropped? Neptune does not give things back. Once he's got it, it's his forever.
(This goes for anything you have in your pockets, as well.
Be careful!)
Being out of the water is excellent, but that water can still
suck the heat out of you right through the floor! Heat conducts.
Here was one way to protect against that heat loss ... an inflatable
floor. This one self-inflated, but some come with floors which
require manual inflation. Not all rafts addressed these concerns,
and it really didn't matter in a heated wave pool, but, for the
ocean, it seemed like a good idea to me.
Here's another idea for combatting heat loss. This raft had an aluminized floor that reflected heat. That seemed like a good idea to me, but then one of the pilots there, who flies almost exclusively over the tropics, said it might be a good idea for colder waters, but for the tropics, he figured it would become too hot ... and bright.
Notice what's in the center of the floor. That's an auto-bailer. This raft didn't come with a bucket. (Remember that bucket, above?) This cone of material is attached at the narrow end to a one-way valve in the bottom of the raft. When there's water inside the raft, you grasp the larger open end of the cone by the ring that is sewn in at the opening, lower it to the floor, lift the ring up, trapping water in the cone, squeeze the material together in your fists above the water you've trapped, and press down. It "farts" the captured water out the bottom of the raft! Repeat until there's so little water that it's not worth it any more. That was cool!
At the risk of giving too much information, I'll just let you know that this was the only raft with a barf tube in it. You throw up into the wide semi-rigid rubber pipe/tube and it goes out down through the floor. Quite useful in the real world, since, in the confines of a raft, vomiting is contagious. Just another of those thoughful details that you normally wouldn't think of ... (Ewwww!)
Notice the straps all around the inner perimeter? Those are very nice when the waves are hitting hard. Grab tight and hold on. Most of the rafts had something like that.
Perhaps the most unusual raft we tested was a U.S. Air Force pilot's
raft. Imagine an inflatable mummy-style sleeping bag, with air
instead of stuffing, attached to an oval shaped inner tube. Make it
DARK green on the outside and BRIGHT orange on the inside. Close it
up when you need to avoid the enemy. Open it up when you need to be
seen by SAR. It had a
manually inflatable floor, ballast bags underneath in the water and
a drogue. (I haven't talked much about drogues. Suffice to say,
you need one ... a good one.
Read Doug's
site to find out more.)
It was surprisingly sturdy and stable, and there was actually a nice bit of room. (Especially since what room you had was yours! You didn't have to share! Nice!) It was bigger than it looks.
Perhaps best of all from a pilot's perspective, before inflation, it
was the size of two medium pizza boxes stacked on top of each other.
Tiny!
I don't really have much more to write. I just wanted to let some of
you see what it was all about. I'll just leave you with a few more
pictures.
It's all in a day's work for Doug.
But it was a once in a lifetime experience for me!
NOTE:
My understanding is that motion sickness comes from differences in the
information coming to your brain from your eyes and inner ears. If
your balance mechanism "feels" motion but your eyes can't "see" it,
you can become disoriented. Being able to look out a window and
see that, yes indeed, we are, in fact, moving ... a lot ...
in strange and unfamiliar ways ... apparently helped my brain
make more sense out of the odd information it was receiving
from my inner ears and calm down about the whole thing.
