Professional skier Nick McNutt was buried in an avalanche in March 2020. While he was under the snow, his Pieps DSP Pro beacon failed to emit a signal, making it impossible for the group searching for him to discover his location using their transceivers. It was only a random strike with an avalanche probe in the slide zone that found him. The incident led him and the skiers he was with that day to question whether the switch on the transceiver had unknowingly toggled between send and search modes a worst-case scenario that McNutt was fortunate to live through.
The athletes worked with Black Diamond (the distributor of the beacons in North America) and Austria-based Pieps to investigate the alleged problem. But in October, frustrated that the two brands hadn’t made a public statement addressing the potential issues in the seven months since the incident,