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."

Comments

This will only work ...

[PPH]

... if the flight crew can't turn off their transponders.

Re:This will only work ...

[PPH]

True. But a fire with a flight crew interested in survival will try to land the plane and contact help ASAP. Even if they don't make it, it shouldn't be too difficult to search for a downed plane from the point of last contact. If the flight crew is up to no good, they could fly for hours after turning comms off. And avoid air traffic control/military radar. And make some evasive course changes.

Re:Surprised that this wasn't already being done

[Anonymous Coward]

The plane knows where it is. Isn't the problem sending that info back to home base?

It's not "Malaysia Air."

[NG Resonance]

The company is known as Malaysia Airlines, or MAS for short.

Re:What good is satellite tracking...

[DickBreath]

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.

You can do better

[s.petry]

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*

Re:Surprised that this wasn't already being done

[Anonymous Coward]

Love it when someone compares unreliable low end consumer tech (that doesn't even fully provide the functions needed for an application) with something that has to be bullet proof and work reliably 100% of the time at a professional level.

Re: Good but how about Backup

[Type44Q]

OMG, UFO got us in they beam!

All your base are belong to us?

Re: Surprised that this wasn't already being done

[guruevi]

That is indeed the problem. In itself not a huge problem except for the continuous cost.

You need a reasonable uplink to a satellite or barring that a huge radio transmitter and global network of receivers. 100Kbps may not seem like a lot but having hundreds of planes across the world sending it to space, aggregating the streams across several continents and saving the telemetry is not simple. In emergency situations you maybe want the system to send significantly more data.

And even then, the benefit will be minimal. We may end up knowing where the plane went down but that doesn't bring it back or makes it easy to find and recover from the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It takes days for boats to get out to some locations of the world.

There are many things in an airplane that are done for cost mitigation. There is no room for oxygen tanks in planes, any high-altitude issue allows only a few minutes of oxygen nor will you have sufficient food and water for a mid-ocean crash.