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Malaysia Air Is First Airline to Track Fleet With Satellites (bloomberg.com)
From a report: Malaysia Air, which lost a wide-body jet with 239 people aboard three years ago in one of history's most enduring aviation mysteries, has become the first airline to sign an agreement for space-based flight tracking of its aircraft. The subsidiary of Malaysian Airline System Bhd reached a deal with Aireon LLC, SITAONAIR and FlightAware LLC to enable it to monitor the flight paths of its aircraft anywhere in the world including over the polar regions and the most remote oceans, according to an emailed press release from Aireon. Aireon is launching a new satellite network with Iridium Communications Inc. that will allow it to monitor air traffic around the globe. It's projected to be completed in 2018. Most international flights are already transmitting their position with technology known as ADS-B and the signals can be tracked from the ground or space. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has already installed a ground-based tracking system for ADS-B. "Real-time global aircraft tracking has long been a goal of the aviation community," Malaysia Chief Operating Officer Izham Ismail said in the release. "We are proud to be the first airline to adopt this solution."
Surprised that this wasn't already being done given that a basic sat tracker costs $100 or so.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Have gnu, will travel.
The company is known as Malaysia Airlines, or MAS for short.
IIRC MH370 had all this stuff already, and it was knocked out by power failures. Malaysian would be better off IMO by getting a really good backup power system so the existing systems survive a future MH370-esque event.
At least you can find it. That's worth something.
What good? To have some idea of where it actually went down. Or at the very least, to know when and where it was last heard from. Then the pieces can be found. It may be possible to determine why it went down.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The pilot was a Muslim so is prone to jihad and homicide.
satellite ackbar!!! its a trap!!!!
The functionality is an InReach and a little duct tape.
Don't you think it a bit unfair to call our dear leader "impotent" or "ignorant"?
Being illiterate, unable to speak in complete sentences, and ignoring facts doesn't mean he is ignorant any more so than having tiny hands might mean he is impotent. Being orange doesn't make him a clown any more than it makes him an oompa loompa. it's because as everyone knows, oranges have thick skin. Oh, wait. He doesn't have very thick skin. Oh, well. At least the other crazy dear leader doesn't appear to use Twitter. Or we would be in real trouble.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Just give the passenger free WIFI already.
Then you'll have 300 gizmos inside the cabin, tracking themselves via satellite and sharing that info with god knows how many people, which all will be able to show the last known position of the passengers.
That was my statue of impotent rage!
How about: "This was all a false flag to get airline companies to use Satellite tracking systems, brought on by big-tech"? What ever happened to creative conspiracy?
*sigh*
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This isn't new...Maybe it's a new way, but it's not a new capability.. Such data services already exist and are in use.
I was SURE I saw a number of news stories about how the airlines already had the capacity to track their aircraft for maintenance reasons and that it worked within most latitudes using geosynchronous satellites already in place. The issue was Malaysia Air hadn't paid the fees for the service so no data was transferred though the equipment did "ping" the satellite on a regular basis during the flight that went missing. I don't think this works around the poles, but I'm sure it would cover more than 95% of aircraft which where outside of ADS ground based coverage.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This data need not be public. Flight aware shows the squawks from all plane transponders on your cell phone. Not sure how real time that data is.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think it's pretty cool and way overdue for the satellite tracking to finally happen. I have my own ADS-B ground station running PiAware. I'd be interested to see what planes are tracked only via satellite when out of ground station range. http://flightaware.com/adsb/pi...
I didn't RTFA, but TFS sure sounds as if the aircraft is transmitting its position to satellites instead of to ground receivers.
I.e. it's something that can be turned off.
"Tracking" my ass.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Horse Bolted. Check
Closed gate. Check
Maybe they plan on losing another.
It crashed into the bloody sea: gravity is your co-pilot.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
I've had 5 electrical fires in the last 20 years. Fortunately, given that real engineers are a lot more thoughtful than you, every one has been very safely dealt with by turning off the affected box.
So if I understand well, turning off an electronic device stops a fire?
Not if the crew can still pull the circuit breaker for the transponder.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Huh. Surprised to see you didn't post as AC. Nonsense that stupid is rarely something anyone wants to own.
Yes, Iridium would mean satellites. So position can be tracked globally, even in the middle of the ocean as long as (1) aircraft can still transmit, and (2) aircraft still knows its position by either GPS or other means.
If position transmission can be turned off, you at least know when and where it was turned off. Knowing how much fuel was aboard at that point, gives you a radius of where the aircraft could be -- which might not be that helpful.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.