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After the baffling disappearance in March of Flight MH370, critics accused the aviation industry of "dithering" over equipping jets with real-time tracking systems. Now, with another passenger plane lost, the call for action is becoming more insistent.
Tracking aircraft by satellite and live-streaming of black box data were cited as top priorities by industry insiders after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people on board. Its fate remains a mystery despite a long underwater search west of Australia. Members of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)—the UN's aviation body—agreed in the aftermath of the incident to mandate real-time tracking.
But they did not set a timeline as airlines mulled the additional costs involved. Many carriers have been losing money for years. Now, with the apparent loss of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 on Sunday off Indonesia, the calls for immediate changes have returned with vehemence.
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-airasia-fuels-real-time-tracking.html
[Related]: http://www.airtrafficmanagement.net/2014/12/iata-no-silver-bullet-solution-on-tracking-in-wake-of-mh370/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Wednesday December 31 2014, @02:21AM
Slightly off topic but anyone who is looking at the SPOT (or SPOT 2) devices should really read the bad reviews of them on Amazon. The SPOT devices and the expensive yearly service that goes with it are not something that I would ever rely on for any situation resembling an emergency. If you are going out into the wilderness or out on a boat, do yourself a huge favor and buy a proper EPIRB or other standardized personal locator radio beacon. Other than possibly needing to be registered so whoever is receiving the signal will know who you are and who to contact once it starts broadcasting, they do not need any expensive yearly satellite service fees and are very reliable, broadcasting a signal that can be received possibly hundreds of miles away (depending on the device).
Speaking of EPIRBs, around here all commercial marine vessels and many private vessels above a certain size or with a certain number of passengers are required by law to have auto-releasing, auto-activating EPIRB units mounted externally on the vessel, so that if the vessel gets into trouble the survivors (hopefully floating nearby in an also-required survival raft that automatically cuts itself free from a sinking vessel) can be more easily located. How it is that commercial airliners containing hundreds of people are not required to have a similar device onboard is really beyond me. The largest units are the size of a couple loaves of bread and can't weigh more than ten pounds, but will broadcast a signal for hundreds of miles for several days. At the very least such devices would allow much faster locating of where the plane entered the ocean.
And then there's GPS, which surveyors now routinely use to make centimeter-accurate plots via special multiple-antenna setups. Surely the computers onboard big commercial airliners know when Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong even if a pilot hasn't pushed the "Aww, Shiiii" button, and could start screaming out highly accurate GPS coordinates (including altitude, of course) once per second until the plane comes to a stop. Given current technology, this does not seem like it would be a difficult or expensive thing to implement.
We also have ballistic parachutes [youtube.com], at least for small planes, which we should be capable of adapting to larger planes. How many crashes have we had in recent years that would have been easily survivable if the plane had impacted at 10 MPH instead of 150 MPH? Lots, I'd wager. But I've seen no sign that anyone is interested in putting these parachutes on anything larger than a Cessna. Too "expensive", I guess.
At every level it is just exceedingly bizarre that we are even capable of "losing" commercial airliners today. And who the hell thought it was a good idea to make a transponder that was capable of being disabled from inside the plane while it's in flight? That's the biggest thing that has always bugged me about the disappearance of MH370. They "lost" the plane because the transponder was disabled in flight. I could understand the need for that on a military aircraft, but deactivating the transponder on a commercial aircraft in flight should automatically activate a backup transponder that can't be accessed, and therefore can't be disabled, from inside the plane.
Of course, we also still have hundreds of passenger train systems around the world that are driven manually by a single human, with no automatic safety systems whatsoever in place to slow down the train or alert headquarters when the (single, remember!) idiot human pilot feels like doing 80 MPH around a curve that the laws of physics says you must go around at less than 30 MPH if you don't want to derail the train. So I don't know why I'm surprised we keep misplacing giant airplanes.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday December 31 2014, @08:03AM
Of course the transponder needs to be able to disabled by the pilot in an emergency, such as when a terrorist fires a missile that locks onto the transponder signal [as you can easily determine how the missile is tracking you by a few basic maneuvers including turning the engines off and then on again].
Haven't you seen ANY action movies involving airplanes?