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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: 2) by tibman on Tuesday December 30 2014, @09:09PM
The pilot can velcro something like this near his dash: http://www.findmespot.com/en/?cid=102 [findmespot.com]
It might raise everyone's plane ticket by one dollar. The US Army has had this kind of technology deployed in every truck, tank, and plane for over a decade. It isn't even specialized hardware anymore. Just googled up another random one: http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/product/sat-trac-b.do?sortby=bestSellers&from=fn [brickhousesecurity.com] less than 20$ per hour operating cost (assuming one track every five minutes or so).
Commercial planes didn't "dither" over installing tvs, wifi, and phone service. They were excited when the technologies became smaller, lighter, and cheap. Reliably tracking planes is a good idea.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Adamsjas on Tuesday December 30 2014, @10:09PM
Virtually nothing on a plane is "off the shelf". Plus the linked site gives no information about the satellite coverage area.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday December 30 2014, @10:28PM
Anything with a brand name that can be ordered off the internet is "off the shelf". I'll bet that includes nearly every instrument plugged into the pilot's panel : ) The second link has a coverage map in the specs tab.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 30 2014, @10:42PM
And these products are approved by FAA for aircraft use where? And approved by ICAO where? Oh, turns out you don't know anything about type acceptance for avionics. Not surprised.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday December 31 2014, @01:34AM
You guys are hard to please. I just googled "satellite track faa approved" and found a bunch. Here's link #1: http://blueskynetwork.com/product/faa-certified-d1000a/ [blueskynetwork.com]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 31 2014, @04:46PM
Yes, we are hard to please.
Now you can provide not just unit costing (which I'm sure will be made up sooner or later by ticket prices, but I'd expect something not less than $8000 per unit,) ongoing maintenance costs, and also ongoing operational costs for an Iridium data link (which is where I expect the real costs lie if you want to do something that it constantly transmitting data at not more than ten minute intervals.)
Then tell me how much we have to add to the cost of the average ticket, accounting for how many passengers we'll lose to the competition because they're NOT required to do any of this.
Then, fancy web-app or not, if you're seriously looking at using this for fleet monitoring, you'll need custom monitoring applications that will report when the heartbeat signal is lost, new staff hires for monitoring this whiz-bang thing (maybe you can absorb the manpower into Operations, but I doubt it,) protocols for attempting to re-establish contact with the plane (as it is far more likely a given plane's unit will fail rather than it being crashed,) and of course how this whole thing dovetails into what the airlines currently *actually do* in the event of a missing plane - which they already have plans for.
All of this is just a fancy way of saying that while your idea has merit and would be nice, actually putting it into practice is a hell of a lot more complex and costly than "just do it."
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday December 31 2014, @06:17PM
You are assuming that knowing where every plane was in your fleet (in real-time) wouldn't save you money somewhere. If your friends could track your flight in real-time then that is also a perk. They can check their phone and know exactly where you are and not just some best guess "on-time" listed on the website. "Just do it" doesn't mean it doesn't cost money or time. It means just do it. I have installed and used two-way satellite communication systems. They are as difficult to maintain as a normal radio (not difficult). Transmitter, receiver, laptop, and a bunch of cables. That is for a two-way system. It will cost more money to install the thing than to purchase it. There is so much nay-saying over something that has been solved for a decade. Google will turn up plenty of options if anyone actually cares to look instead of judging my suggestion without any research.
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(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?