Your Free Emergency Beacon: SafeSky Search and Rescue
- Tristan Fily
- 8 minutes ago
- 8 min read
The current season is often a little quieter for flying. Shorter days, more wind, more IMC, and a lot more time spent planning than actually taking off. But that is exactly why it is the perfect moment to prepare for the better flying days to come.
One of the easiest and most important things you can do today is to set up a feature that is still not widely known: SafeSky Search and Rescue, also called SAR:
"It is a free emergency beacon inside the SafeSky app, designed for general aviation, helicopter, gliders, paramotor, paraglider and microlight pilots."
What you need to know |
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1 - The problem: finding a missing aircraft can take hours
Search and Rescue services in Europe are extremely professional, coordinated, and experienced. But they have one constraint:
They cannot rescue what they cannot locate.
In Europe, retrieving a missing aircraft often takes several hours. The average can be around four hours, and sometimes much more, depending on terrain, weather, and how quickly reliable information becomes available.
National authorities and rescue services regularly contact SafeSky when they need help reconstructing the last known flight path of an aircraft. That is because location and timing are often the biggest missing pieces, especially when tracking disappears and nobody knows where to start looking.
Why localisation is difficult, even with the transponder on?
Many pilots assume that if an aircraft is ADS-B or Mode-S equipped and the transponder is on, it will always be trackable.
Unfortunately, that is not always true.
Most surveillance systems, whether radar or ADS-B receivers, depend on line of sight. When you fly low, especially below a certain altitude, your signal may simply no longer reach the ground stations or radar sites that are tracking you.
And in mountainous terrain, this challenge becomes even bigger:
• valleys can fall outside radar coverage
• terrain can block ADS-B reception
• even a small ridge can be enough to hide the aircraft from ground receivers
The result is that even when you are still transmitting perfectly, the track seen by others can suddenly stop. Rescue teams may then be left with a last known position that is already several minutes, or several kilometres, out of date.
How Search and Rescue normally gets triggered?
In most cases, Search and Rescue does not begin the moment something goes wrong. It begins when someone such as ATC, a friend, a flying club, or a rescue coordination centre realises that an aircraft may be in trouble and starts the alerting chain.
That can happen in several ways:
• a flight plan is not closed and the aircraft never arrives
• ATC loses contact or receives a distress call
• someone reports the aircraft missing
• an emergency beacon signal is detected
From there, the response follows a structured escalation:
• Uncertainty phase, INCERFA
• Alert phase, ALERFA
• Distress phase, DETRESFA
These phases exist for good reasons. They prevent false alarms from consuming limited rescue resources, and they ensure a coordinated response. But they also mean that a search can only become truly effective once there is enough information about where to look, and what the last known position really was.
2 - Existing safety tools and their limits under stress
Aviation already has excellent safety systems, and we should always encourage pilots to use them. These tools save lives every day and remain the foundation of emergency alerting.
But emergencies are not training exercises. When workload suddenly explodes, when you are low, distracted, or fighting to keep the aircraft under control, even the simplest actions can become difficult. That is where the limits are not technical. They are human.
Transponder emergency squawk
In an emergency, the standard transponder code is 7700. The code 7600 is for radio failure and 7500 is for unlawful interference.
In theory, setting 7700 is straightforward. In practice, during a real emergency, remembering the code and dialling it in may not be as easy as we would like to believe.
There is also a practical limitation. This only helps if the aircraft is equipped with a transponder, which is far from being the case across all categories of aviation (less than 10% of general aviation is equipped with ADS-B Out. Other categories have... nothing standard?).
ELTs and Personal Locator Beacons
Satellite distress beacons, such as 406 MHz ELTs and PLBs, are a proven and highly recommended tool. They alert rescue coordination centres through the Cospas Sarsat satellite system, and many models include GNSS location plus a 121.5 MHz homing signal to help rescuers pinpoint your position once they are nearby.
But here again, the limitations are real. Beacons depend on being triggered, surviving impact, remaining accessible, and being activated correctly.
And this is where the reality is simple: In a real emergency, human factors matter. Stress affects memory, motor control, and decision making, even for experienced pilots.
That is exactly why SafeSky Search and Rescue exists. It does not replace proven safety tools. It adds another safety layer using equipment you already carry, and it may still help when stress or circumstances prevent you from doing everything by the book.
3 - Introducing SafeSky Search and Rescue
SafeSky Search and Rescue is a free emergency beacon built directly into the SafeSky app.
Is designed to be simple to use, even in a high stress situation. Once configured in the app, it stays ready in the background and requires no action before flight.
In an emergency, a dedicated MAYDAY button becomes available in the app. Pressing it triggers the Search and Rescue workflow, alerting your trusted contacts and sharing your position and live tracking information so they can quickly relay it to the appropriate rescue services.
Its purpose is simple. Reduce the time it takes for rescuers to get the information that matters most, especially in the first critical minutes.
... and it works with the hardware you already carry on every flight: your phone or tablet.
The most important part: what if you cannot press MAYDAY button?
In an ideal world, you press the MAYDAY button the moment you realise the situation is escalating.
But emergencies are rarely ideal. That is why SafeSky Search and Rescue is designed with a crucial unique safety principle: passive SAR tracking:
Even if you are under stress and cannot press the MAYDAY button, your phone will continue to transmit your position as long as it is working.
This is not theoretical. It is exactly the kind of situation described in our Iceland incident story, where continuity of tracking made a difference.
What if the phone stops working?
SafeSky will continue to transmit your position for as long as your phone remains operational.
But in a serious crash scenario, the phone may be damaged or destroyed. Even then, the system still provides critical value. The last recorded traces remain available for rescue services for 72 hours.
This ensures the search does not start from zero. Rescue teams can still work from the most valuable clue: your last known position and your recent track, which often takes hours to reconstruct through other means.
Why SafeSky uses trusted contacts?
One of the challenges with emergency alerting is avoiding false alarms.
To keep the system fast and responsible, SafeSky Search and Rescue uses a trusted relay path. Instead of contacting rescue services directly, it ensures that a real person confirms the situation and relays the correct information.
You can choose up to three trusted contacts (pilot friend, your instructor, spouse, other?).
Working with Search and Rescue operations
This Search and Rescue capabilities is implemented in close collaboration with national authorities and SAR organisations.
In November 2025, SafeSky participated in the "EUR Search and Rescue Task Force" in Paris to discuss solutions and integration improvements with operational procedures.
4 - How to set it up (takes 2 minutes)
Setting up SafeSky Search and Rescue is quick, and it is best done now, while you are relaxed, on the ground, and not under pressure.
To enable it:
Open SafeSky
Go to Settings, then Search and Rescue
Read and accept the procedure
Add up to three trusted contacts, phone number and email
Now comes the most important step: brief your contacts in advance: SafeSky SAR is designed so that your trusted contacts relay the alert to the correct rescue services. So they should know what to do if they receive your message:
• call the SAR service using the precise phone number provided
• forward the email address if needed
• share the live tracking link showing your position
Two minutes of setup today can save precious time later.
5 - How it works in practice?
Once SAR is enabled in your settings, it stays ready in the background. You do not need to do anything special before each flight. SafeSky simply makes the emergency workflow available when you are airborne.
5.1 - In flight
After take off, the MAYDAY icon becomes available in the SafeSky app.
If you ever need to trigger an emergency alert:
Tap the MAYDAY button
Confirm with a slide gesture to prevent accidental activation
SafeSky activates the SAR workflow
5.2 - Your contacts receive an alert immediately
SafeSky sends the alert to your trusted contacts by SMS and email, including:
• your precise position
• a direct link to your live location
• the correct SAR phone number and email address for the area you are flying
5.3 - Your contacts do the relay
Your contacts do not have to search who to call. SafeSky provides the correct SAR contact details for your position.
Your trusted contacts then call the rescue services using the phone number provided and forward the live tracking link. If needed, they also forward the email details so SAR can access everything immediately.
5.4 - Tracking continues
Once SAR is active, SafeSky continues to transmit and record your position as long as your phone is working. This helps keep the last known position accurate, even in difficult terrain or limited coverage.
5.5 - What if there is no internet connection?
If SafeSky cannot immediately send the alert due to lack of connectivity, the app continues recording your track. As soon as internet becomes available again, it will publish the last known trace and resume live updates.
6 - Two minutes now, ready for the day you hope never comes
As pilots, we are taught to always stay ahead of the aircraft. We brief, plan, anticipate, and prepare, because in aviation the time to think is before things start happening fast.
Most of us will never need Search and Rescue, and we truly hope you never do.
But if a flight ever turns into a serious situation, one thing becomes essential very quickly: being found fast.
So while the season is quieter, take two minutes today. Set up SAR in SafeSky, add your trusted contacts, and brief them so they know how to relay an alert immediately.
Related stories and references:
Unfortunately, this is when drama happens. For some aircraft categories, 2021 is the worst year since 2014 in terms of fatal accidents (source: EASA Annual Report 2022) .
Here are just a few examples of serious incidents that happened in 2022 that were made public:
Country | |||
When? | July 2022 | September 2022 | December 2022 |
What? | ULM forced landing due to motor issues | ULM crashes going to the MULM in Blois | ULM crashes in river |
Time lost | Plane missing for 2.5 hours | Plane missing for >5 hours | Plane missing for 1 day |
Casualties | No casualties | 2 casualties | 2 casualties |
SafeSky/SAR use | Using SafeSky but SAR not configured nor used | Using SafeSky but SAR not configured nor used | Not using SafeSky, no SAR raised* |
* According to media, the magistrate had refused to geolocate the occupants’ mobile phone for data protection reasons.
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