Capt. Wayne Hensley with the stolen emergency position indicating radio beacon, which he found after helping track its signal to an abandoned house.
Capt. Mike Turoff
Commander
Hobby Senior Squadron
Texas Wing
TEXAS – Two members of the Hobby Senior Squadron tracked down what turned out to be a stolen emergency position indicating radio beacon July 10 in a Houston neighborhood.
For Capt. Mike Turoff, the squadron’s commander, the mission began when his ringing telephone awoke him at 6 a.m. It was Lt. Col. Rick Woolfolk, Texas Wing alerting officer, asking if he could assemble an urban direction-finding team to locate an activated emergency position indicating radio beacon signal that the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center satellite system had been receiving since 11 o’clock the night before. The devices, carried by boaters and on commercial shipping vessels, are the aquatic equivalent of the emergency locator transmitters found on airplanes.
At first, Turoff replied that he had to go to work, so he declined the opportunity. As soon as he was fully awake, though, he realized that it was Saturday, a day off from work. A quick return call to Woolfolk settled the matter, and Turoff accepted the assignment.
The mission was an unusual one because the beacon’s owner, contacted by the AFRCC, said it had been reported stolen before being activated.
Complicating matters was the fact that ongoing activities meant very few local Civil Air Patrol members were likely to be available for the job. As a result, Turoff called 10 local members before getting a volunteer, Capt. Wayne Hensley, his squadron’s personnel officer.
Once they met up, Turoff and Hensley had to work with a Houston police officer because the signal's location put it in a residential area of the city’s 5th Ward. Upon arriving at the signal’s approximate site, they and the officer started a slow, progressive search of the area using the Houston squadron's Little L-Per direction-finding system.
As they searched, almost 30 minutes went by with only background noise audible on the system. Finally, as the team went slightly past the designated area, the roof-mounted three-antenna system picked up a definite signal.
Turoff, Hensley and the officer proceeded to the nearest house to ask if the resident had such a beacon. The homeowner knew nothing about it, but gave permission to the officer and the two CAP members to search the area.
An apparently abandoned house, its doors and windows open, stood next door. The signal seemed to be coming from there.
The police officer entered the house, then summoned Hensley to come in with the direction-finding unit. As the officer searched, the signal seemed to be coming from a sports-type carrying bag in one of the rooms.
Once the bag was opened, there it was – the stolen beacon.
Turoff assisted the officer in turning off the device, then notified the AFRCC and Woolfolk of the search's success. After thbe police officer took possession of the beacon, its owner was contacted. He was thrilled to learn that the beacon-detecting system did indeed work and that the CAP members had been able to track the device down – and would have been able to do so had he used it if he encountered an emergency while sailing.
