Malaysia Airlines will track its planes from space
Just after midnight local time on March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport with 239 people on board settling in for what should have been a routine red-eye to Beijing.
The plane never made it to China, instead vanishing somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Its disappearance launched a years-long search, by land and by sea, that was ultimately suspended without any conclusions but that cost millions. To this day, what really happened to Flight 370 remains one of the greatest mysteries in modern aviation.
On Tuesday, more than three years after the tragedy, Malaysia Airlines announced it would be the first airline to begin tracking all of its aircraft with spacebased satellites. Doing so will allow the airline to have access to “minute-by-minute, 100 percent global, flighttracking data” for all of its planes, according to a joint statement by three companies partnering to provide the service to the air carrier: Aireon, FlightAware and SITAOnAir.
“This is the biggest improvement in flight tracking since radar was invented during World War II,” FlightAware founder and chief executive Daniel Baker said in a video about the technology last fall. “For the first time ever, airlines will be able to track their airplanes even in places that aren’t served by current satellite constellations - and it doesn’t matter if they’re flying over the ocean, if it’s over the desert, if it’s over the North Pole: We’ll know where the plane is.”
Such precise monitoring will be made possible by a network of 66 satellites that Aireon’s parent company, Iridium, plans to launch and have in orbit by the middle of next year. On each of those satellites will be a receiver that can track flights using automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast technology, or ADS-B, a successor to radar.
Many aviation agencies around the world, including the Federal Aviation Administration, are transitioning away from radar and using real-time ADS-B for airtraffic control. By 2020, the FAA will require planes to have ADS-B equipment to fly in most controlled airspace.
While it’s unclear whether satellite tracking would have changed anything in the aftermath of Flight 370’s disappearance, the developments come amid new rules for how planes must communicate with air-traffic controllers.
Even though flight disappearances are rare, Aireon chief executive Don Thoma imagines real-time tracking would improve the aviation industry overall by allowing planes to fly more optimal routes, something the FAA noted when moving toward ADS-B technology.
“With ADS-B, pilots for the first time see what controllers see: displays showing other aircraft in the sky. Cockpit displays also pinpoint hazardous weather and terrain, and give pilots important flight information, such as temporary flight restrictions,” the FAA stated on its website. “Relying on satellites instead of ground navigational aids also means aircraft will be able to fly more directly from Point A to B, saving time and money, and reducing fuel burn and emissions.”