AviationWould real-time tracking have helped missing flight MH370?
The introduction of constant tracking of commercial aircraft during the whole journey has been raised by Malaysian authorities in a preliminary report into missing flight MH370. There have now been two occasions during the last five years when large commercial air transport aircraft have gone missing and their last position was not accurately known. There is little doubt that as the search for MH370 continues without finding evidence of the actual site of the wreckage, and the associated search costs continue to rise, changes to air safety will be made. Already there is a suggestion to increase the duration of the recording time of the cockpit voice recorders from two to twenty hours. The emphasis on looking for alternate means of tracking transport aircraft, and the interest in establishing systems for routine transmission and remote storage of flight data, will also grow within governments globally.
The introduction of constant tracking of commercial aircraft during the whole journey has been raised by Malaysian authorities in a preliminary report into missing flight MH370.
It’s been two months now since Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 was declared missing on 8 March and search and rescue authorities are still no closer to locating any potential crash site or finding any actual wreckage.
The five-page report released last week by the Malaysian government details some of the efforts being taken to find the missing flight over a wide area, including extending the search to the Southern Indian Ocean.
It doesn’t mention by name but refers to the two-year search for wreckage of the Air France 447 Airbus jet that disappeared into the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa in 2009.
There have now been two occasions during the last five years when large commercial air transport aircraft have gone missing and their last position was not accurately known.
The report then says the Malaysian Air Accident Investigation Bureau recommends that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) looks at the potential safety benefits of real-time tracking of all transport aircraft.
This would involve establishing a means of tracking aircraft even when they are outside of established radar coverage.
It would not be practical or cost effective to extend surface based radar coverage to include all the world’s oceans, so tracking aircraft positions mid ocean would doubtless have to include monitoring by satellite.
Can’t GPS help?
Unfortunately global positioning satellite (GPS) technology such as that used by the common smartphone (or in car navigation systems) could not be used for this.
That technology involves only one-way transmissions from the GPS satellite constellation which are received by the phone. This allows the phone to work out its geographical location with considerable accuracy but the GPS system does not have any information on the actual location of the phone.
For any real-time location technology to work there must be two-way communication in order for the system to know where the receiver actually is.
So, probably the cheapest and simplest way to achieve this would be for each aircraft to “ping” a satellite periodically, say once a minute, with a packet of information that includes the aircraft’s altitude, latitude and longitude.
