DEPTHS OF DATA
As search for Flight 370 continues, two Canadian companies pitch alternatives to the black box,
The pings have faded altogether.
It’s been a week since searchers last heard faint sounds from deep below the Indian Ocean, believed to be signals from the black boxes of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
For more than a month, crews have desperately looked for the missing Boeing 777 jetliner, which disappeared off radar in the early morning hours of March 8, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
The U.S. Navy’s Bluefin-21 robotic submarine has done runs this week, but so far has produced no signs of the aircraft. The search area is an estimated 46,600 square kilometres — about the size of Vermont and New Hampshire — and investigators caution that the sub’s deployment may not result in the detection of the wreckage, though it is the best lead so far.
The disappearance of a jetliner in this digital age, where everything can and will be tracked, raises questions of whether black boxes are obsolete. Two Canadian companies, both of which trade on the venture exchange, are selling technology to send real-time data from the air to the ground.
Although the technology is aimed at helping airlines maximize revenues by providing pinpointed data, the side benefit is the ability to track planes.
“The airplane always knows where it is. The issue is having people on the ground knowing it,” said Richard Hayden, director of Flyht, in an interview. He noted that the company’s Automated Flight Information Reporting System (AFIRS) technology is on 350 aircraft over six continents, and is used by commercial, charter and business carriers.
Airline operations are dependent on flights going out when they want, on time, every time, Hayden said. With AFIRS’ immediate streaming of data via satellite, airlines can detect issues and plan accordingly.
Flyht signed a deal this week with First Air, which operates in the Canadian North, to place the equipment on its 21 aircraft.
“People buy our systems to improve operations,” Hayden said, noting traditional black boxes do not offer day-to-day information that airlines can use.
The AFIRS technology costs up to $100,000 on average to put on an aircraft, with additional data charges per flight hour that depend on how much information is streamed.
Hayden estimates that the cost to stream all data from the missing Malaysian airliner, which is believed to have flown for as long as seven hours, would have been $4,200. The missing Boeing jet is estimated to have cost at least $200 million. The current list price of the jet is more than $260 million.
Star Navigation Systems Group, based in Etobicoke, also offers realtime aircraft monitoring, which can notify officials on the ground of any sudden changes, from altitude shifts to flight plan alterations.
Also designed to boost airline operations, the Star Navigation Systems device has so far only been approved for certain aircraft by Transport Canada. It costs about $50,000 plus $10 per flying hour.
Viraf Kapadia, Star Navigation Systems chairman and CEO, says that the device pays for itself in six to nine months, by identifying savings such as fuel efficiencies and better maintenance schedules.
It cannot be disabled; the transponder in the Malaysian jet was turned off in flight.
“You can find a missing iPhone,” Kapadia said. “In the 21st century, the only thing we can tell people is we have lost the airplane.”
Both Flyht and Star Navigation Systems had a stock-price bump after the Malaysian plane vanished, with Flyht hitting 80 cents in mid-March before falling to 53 cents on Thursday.
Star Navigation Systems now trades at about 7 cents, though it was below 5 cents when the plane disappeared.
While Malaysian officials say the cost of the search for the missing plane is “immaterial” when set against the families’ need to know what happened, the bill is mounting.
One estimate by Reuters pegged the cost of the search at $44 million for the United States, China, Australia and Vietnam, but that does not include the spending by more than 20 other countries that have contributed help. When an Air France plane crashed off the coast of Brazil in 2009, investigators quickly found the wreckage, yet it still took nearly two years to recover the critical black boxes, the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
“You can find a missing iPhone. In the 21st century, the only thing we can tell people is we have lost the airplane.” VIRAF KAPADIA STAR NAVIGATION SYSTEMS CEO
The batteries have a 30-day life, though the International Civil Aviation Organization has since recommended members to extend it to 90 days by 2018. Any talk of requiring airlines to track planes in real time has raised industry concerns about potentially prohibitive costs, but Krishna Kavi, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of North Texas, disputes that argument. Kavi says only small amounts of essential data are needed, such as location and speed every minute or every five minutes. Only in the event of an incident or sudden change is more extensive data called for. He began research into the issue after an Egypt-Air crash off New England in 1999 led to questions of whether the disaster was caused by mechanical problems or pilot suicide. Kavi argued that satellite technology would not always be needed to transmit data; when aircraft are flying over land, they could use existing radio and cell tower infrastructure. “You would be able to get that information on demand,” he said, adding if the pilot couldn’t be reached, then the cockpit voice recorder could be streamed on demand. Others have suggested that aircraft be required to install a floating black box or device designed to eject if an aircraft hits water. “If you don’t know where you crashed, what’s the point? You can’t locate it right, whether it’s floating or not,” Kavi said. Ernie Arvai, a partner at Air-Insight consultancy, argues such transmission would not necessarily be costprohibitive, if simple GPS data were sent. “You could get the basics . . . without having to break the bank,” he said, adding technology costs are significantly cheaper than a decade ago, especially with new software and compressed messaging. “You don’t necessarily need all the data. But what you might do is seek data on anomalies, and begin a burst transmission, and then start sending data,” Arvai said. “There are millions of routine flights for which nothing happens, but when a problem occurs you want to know about it.”
Tony Tyler, CEO of the International Air Transport Association, a trade association for the world’s airlines, acknowledged in a speech in Kuala Lumpur earlier this month that something needs to be done, but not hastily.
“In a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief both that an aircraft could simply disappear and that the black box is so difficult to recover,” Tyler said.
“We cannot let another aircraft simply disappear,” he said, but decisions should be in line with global standards, adding that an International Civil Aviation Organization process is under way.
The ICAO has convened a special meeting next month in Montreal to spur deliberations over the specific aircraft and satellite capabilities needed for global implementation of worldwide flight tracking.
Arvai argued that he believes it will take formal regulations for airlines to adopt changes, because “they are reluctant to spend money on anything unless they are forced to.”
But he added that as more airlines offer live satellite television or Wi-Fi capability to woo passengers, they could leverage that technology.
“Let’s share some of the bandwidth,” he said. “The reason they put it on is they make money with it in the back cabin.
“Well, if you are making money, and if you’ve got the satellite connection in the back cabin, let’s just send a few messages from the front cabin, the other way, to make sure we’re safe.”