In areas where public telecommunications facilities would not permit persons observing an aircraft in emergency to notify the rescue coordination centre concerned directly and promptly, Contracting States should designate suitable units of public or private services as alerting posts.
Distress alerts may arrive at RCCs from a variety of equipment sources and via a variety of alerting posts. Alerting posts include, but are not limited to, coast radio stations (CRSs), local user terminals (LUTs) and mission control centres (MCCs) of the Cospas-Sarsat System, land earth stations (LESs) of the Inmarsat System, air traffic services (ATS) units, commercially available emergency notification device service providers, public safety units such as police and fire departments, and vessels, aircraft, or other persons or facilities which may receive and relay such alerts. Alerting posts are any intermediary facilities which relay distress alerts between their source and the responsible RCC, and may even include other RCCs.
