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New Satellite Network Will Make It Impossible For a Commercial Airplane To Vanish (cbsnews.com)
pgmrdlm quotes a report from CBS News: For the first time, a new network of satellites will soon be able to track all commercial airplanes in real time, anywhere on the planet. Currently, planes are largely tracked by radar on the ground, which doesn't work over much of the world's oceans. The final 10 satellites were launched Friday to wrap up the $3 billion effort to replace 66 aging communication satellites, reports CBS News' Kris Van Cleave, who got an early look at the new technology.
On any given day, 43,000 planes are in the sky in America alone. When these planes take off, they are tracked by radar and are equipped with a GPS transponder. All commercial flights operating in the U.S. and Europe have to have them by 2020. It's that transponder that talks to these new satellites, making it possible to know exactly where more than 10,000 flights currently flying are.
On any given day, 43,000 planes are in the sky in America alone. When these planes take off, they are tracked by radar and are equipped with a GPS transponder. All commercial flights operating in the U.S. and Europe have to have them by 2020. It's that transponder that talks to these new satellites, making it possible to know exactly where more than 10,000 flights currently flying are.
Under routine conditions, the modern airliner can pretty much fly itself. The pilot is there to deal with things that go wrong,. Since you can't possibly predict and program for everything that can go wrong, it's important that the pilot have the final say.
Better that a human be the one who killed us than a machine.
I quite agree. After reading about several recent fatal modern airliner crashes, it seems the problem was caused by the machine overpowering the humans who were unaware of the machine's efforts to compensate / counteract. Or in a few cases, the humans assumed the machine (autopilot) was still in control, when it had been disabled, but indications were subtle. It's too easy to blame the humans for not knowing what was going on. The machine's job is to serve the human and in every case I've read I fault the UI. I'm okay with the machine continuing to monitor and warn in a big way. It stuns me how these things are okayed by FAA and other regulators.