Inappropriate or expired gear

The most dangerous survival gear is the kind that looks ready. Expired, empty, or wrong for the route, it pays out nothing at the exact moment you're betting your life on it — and you don't find out until it's too late to fix.

Gear that gives false confidence

Every piece of equipment in the airplane that reads "present" on the ramp can still be functionally dead:

• An ELT with an expired battery that won't transmit, or won't transmit long enough.
• A PFD with a corroded or spent CO₂ cartridge that won't inflate when you pull the toggle.
• Flares or signaling devices past their date, which may not fire or burn.
• A fire extinguisher with the needle in the red — discharged, or leaked down over years.
• A first-aid kit that's been raided for headaches and band-aids and never restocked, or a water supply that's evaporated or gone bad.

The risk these share is false confidence. A pilot who believes the airplane is equipped plans and flies differently than one who knows it isn't — and that belief, not the gear itself, is what fails. The ramp check that says "yes, there's a vest under the seat" is worthless if the vest won't hold air.

The one item the law keeps current

There's an instructive split here. The ELT is the single piece of survival gear the regulation actively keeps current: <CFR id="91.207" /> requires the battery replaced after one cumulative hour of use or at 50% of useful life (dated on the unit and logged), plus a 12-month inspection. The law builds in a forcing function.

Everything else has no inspection regime at all. No rule schedules a check of your raft's pack date, your flares, your extinguisher charge, or your water. And that's precisely why those items rot unnoticed — there's no annual that catches them. The honest lesson: where the regulation is silent, your own discipline is the only check that exists. Fold a survival-gear review into your periodic personal currency and into the preflight — ELT test light, extinguisher gauge, vest and raft pack dates.

Wrong for the route

Expiration isn't the only failure; mismatch is just as deadly. A life raft does nothing on a leg over high desert. No water does nothing for you on a summer desert crossing. A summer kit is useless on a winter mountain route where exposure is the killer. This loops straight back to K1: match the gear to the route's worst day, then keep that gear current. Either half alone — current-but-wrong, or right-but-expired — leaves you holding equipment that looks like preparation and isn't.