EU adopts tougher rules on tracking jetliners
THE European Union (EU) adopted new rules yesterday to make it easier to track jetliners, stepping up international efforts to prevent a repeat of the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jet with 239 people on board.
The move is the first change in core legislation by a major regulator since last year’s unresolved disappearance of Flight MH370 and is expected to provide impetus to efforts by the United Nations’ (UN’s) aviation agency to set new global standards.
It incorporates recommendations from French investigators into the crash of an Air France jet in the Atlantic in 2009, whose wreckage took two years to find.
In terms of the rules, airlines will be given three years to install a means of tracking aircraft when flying in normal conditions outside radar coverage, over oceans or remote land.
They must also have a system for more frequent updates in the event of an emergency: one that is robust enough to prevent a technical malfunction or someone switching it off, as some investigators suspect happened on the missing Malaysian jet.
“That would make the reoccurrence of scenarios such as (Air France) AF447 or (Malaysia Airlines) MH370 technically impossible,” a European Commission spokesman said.
A global industry task force originally proposed that existing tracking technology should be introduced by 2016, but airlines lobbied for a delay, citing the need to ensure systems worked automatically.
The new EU legislation stops short of specifying the interval between updates, an issue with cost implications that has divided some regulators and airlines. That will be for Europe’s Aviation Safety Agency to decide after consultations. But it fits with plans by the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organisation to impose a 15-minute standard for normal flight tracking by November 2018, while leaving the door open to tighter rules favoured by some European officials.
European regulators have said they would like a jetliner to report its position every three minutes, noting that the four-minute gap in signals from the Air France jet in 2009 left a search area of 17,000km².
Flight recorders or black boxes will also be improved. The maximum length of cockpit voice recordings will be raised to 25 hours from two hours, a measure designed to cover the most extreme situations, such as the lengthy uncharted disappearance of Flight MH370.
Recorders must either be “deployable”, or ejected from an aircraft in distress to prevent them being lost with the aircraft, or easier to find by tripling the pinger battery life to 90 days and lowering the frequency to one easier for military vessels to spot.
One of the key lessons of the 2009 disaster was that using the right frequency is crucial to ensuring the black box signals carry over longer distances and can be picked up by military or coastguard vessels, which are usually first to reach a remote crash site.