Australia leads new plane tracking program

Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia are setting the benchmark in aircraft tracking, just a week out from the anniversary of MH370’s disappearance.

According to a report from Skift, the three search nations will trial an enhanced method of tracking aircraft over remote oceans, ensuring planes will be found more efficiently should they vanish.

Australia’s transport minister Warren Truss said government-owned agency Airservices Australia will work with both Malaysia and Indonesia to test the new method, which would track plane coordinates every 15 minutes, as opposed to the standard rate of every 30-40 minutes.

The tracking would bump up to five minutes or less if there is a deviation in the plane’s movements, according to Skift.

The trial is expected to use satellite-based positioning technology that is already installed on 90% of long-haul aircraft, which shares the plane’s current position, as well as the two impending positions on its course, Airservices Australia’s chairman Angus Houston said.

Houston spoke to reporters in Canberra recently, saying that while the technology is no silver bullet, it’s still a necessary progression.

“It is an important step in delivering immediate improvements to the way we currently track aircraft while more comprehensive solutions are developed,” he said.

According to Skift, Houston also warned that the new method being trialled would not necessarily have made a difference to the tracking of Flight 370, whose tracking equipment shut down during its flight.

The flight 370 vanished from its course on March 8 2014, and despite an extensive, months-long search across a 60,000-square-kilometer patch of the Indian Ocean, nothing has been found.

And while there is no requirement for real-time tracking of commercial aircraft, since the mysterious disappearance of MH370, more and more aviation experts have called for new technology to better track planes in the hopes of avoiding a recurrence of this event.

Skift also quoted Houston as warning that while the system can help track planes more accurately, it can still be turned off onboard.

“If somebody had turned the system off, we’re in the same set of circumstances as we’ve experienced on the latter part of the flight of MH370,” he said.

Image source: Global Voices Online

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