IATA calls for aircraft tracking

IATA calls for aircraft tracking
By admin


The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is creating a taskforce to make recommendations for continuously tracking commercial airliners because “we cannot let another aircraft simply vanish”.

As low clouds, rain and choppy seas off Western Australia hampered Tuesday's hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the head of the operation warned that the 25-day-old search “could drag on for a long time”.

Malaysian investigators said they were scrutinising the last-known conversation between the aircraft and ground control.

The search has turned up no sign of the Boeing 777, which vanished March 8 with 239 people on board bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. A multinational team of aircraft and ships are searching the southern Indian Ocean for the aircraft, which disappeared from radar and veered off-course for reasons that are still unexplained.

The aviation mystery has highlighted the need for improvements in tracking aircraft and security, according to IATA, which has announced the creation of a high-level task force to make recommendations on tracking commercial aircraft.

“In a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief that an aircraft could simply disappear,” IATA director general and managing director Tony Tyler said. “We cannot let another aircraft simply vanish.”

But the Air Line Pilots Association, the world's biggest pilot union, warned that live-streaming of information from the flight data recorder, as an alternative to the current black boxes, could lead to the release or leak of clues that could make pilots look bad before all the facts about an accident are known.

“That data is there for safety analysis,” said Sean Cassidy, an ALPA officer and a pilot with Alaska Airlines.

“Unfortunately, if you have this massive wave of data that's getting out there – if it's not safeguarded and protected – there's going to be a real rush to judgment, especially towards the pilots in event of an accident.”

ALPA said if the goal is to better track aircraft, the answer is a beefed-up, satellite-based navigation system called NextGen.

In Washington, a congressman is considering introducing a bill that would require the installation of a second black box as a back-up measure on new commercial passenger aircraft that are used on longer flights, over oceans or in remote locations.

The devices, known as deployable flight recorders, would eject before a crash to make them easier to find, and can be designed to float and transmit a signal to searchers.

Latest News