A new satellite tracking system is to be fitted to Airbus passenger planes that could render the black box system obsolete and help prevent air disasters. British company Inmarsat, which helped determine the likely flight path of downed Malaysia Airlines MH370, said its technology will provide improved real-time communication of flight data from the cockpit via a satellite to air traffic control.
It would mean ground staff would be able to react much faster to midair malfunctions and terrorist incidents, and allow more crucial onboard data to be transferred in the airplane's final moments should it crash.
It is hoped the technology, known as SwiftBroadband-Safety (SB-S), will help prevent occasions when aircraft have inexplicably gone missing and the black box has not been recovered.
Captain Mary McMillan, Inmarsat's vice president and a former pilot with 30 years in the aviation industry, told the Guardian: "This is a game changer for safety.
"I was flying on 9/11 and the difficulty of getting information back and forth was one of the issues of that time. There is a limited capability for aircraft to stream data depending on links they are using.
"The difference in being able to send a small amount of data is you have to pick and choose what you send. The ability to stream large amounts of data will give us an awareness in real-time of a developing situation about what's taking place on an aircraft."
Aircraft already have the ability to send live data to air traffic control and other planes, but at slower speeds and with less volume. The new system, heralded by Inmarsat as a "paradigm shift in aviation safety and efficiency", will instead provide "unprecedented speed and capacity".
It is to be fitted to the popular Airbus A320 single-aisle and A330 wide-body fleets in 2018.
The search for an improved flight monitoring system has been fuelled by a number of recent incidents in which aircraft have been downed.
This includes the Malaysia Airline flight MH370 which disappeared while carrying 239 passengers en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014. While pieces of wreckage thought to be from the downed plane have washed up on shores in the Indian Ocean, the precise location of the crash site has still not yet been determined.
To Read the News in Full 01/07/16 Paul Wright/IBTimes
It would mean ground staff would be able to react much faster to midair malfunctions and terrorist incidents, and allow more crucial onboard data to be transferred in the airplane's final moments should it crash.
It is hoped the technology, known as SwiftBroadband-Safety (SB-S), will help prevent occasions when aircraft have inexplicably gone missing and the black box has not been recovered.
Captain Mary McMillan, Inmarsat's vice president and a former pilot with 30 years in the aviation industry, told the Guardian: "This is a game changer for safety.
"I was flying on 9/11 and the difficulty of getting information back and forth was one of the issues of that time. There is a limited capability for aircraft to stream data depending on links they are using.
"The difference in being able to send a small amount of data is you have to pick and choose what you send. The ability to stream large amounts of data will give us an awareness in real-time of a developing situation about what's taking place on an aircraft."
Aircraft already have the ability to send live data to air traffic control and other planes, but at slower speeds and with less volume. The new system, heralded by Inmarsat as a "paradigm shift in aviation safety and efficiency", will instead provide "unprecedented speed and capacity".
It is to be fitted to the popular Airbus A320 single-aisle and A330 wide-body fleets in 2018.
The search for an improved flight monitoring system has been fuelled by a number of recent incidents in which aircraft have been downed.
This includes the Malaysia Airline flight MH370 which disappeared while carrying 239 passengers en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014. While pieces of wreckage thought to be from the downed plane have washed up on shores in the Indian Ocean, the precise location of the crash site has still not yet been determined.
To Read the News in Full 01/07/16 Paul Wright/IBTimes
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