Airline News
Agreement on satellite aircraft tracking ‘close’; searchers close in on MH370
November 13th 2015
Countries are nearing agreement on using satellites to track flights as they strive to prevent the repetition of the unsolved disappearance of MH370 in March last year, according to a high-level U.S. official. Read More »
"We believe the world is close to a solution on global flight-tracking," U.S. ambassador, Decker Anstrom, who heads Washington's delegation to a United Nations conference in Geneva on evolving information and communications technologies, told AFP.
The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) supports a proposal that obligates airlines to track their aircraft at 15-minute intervals. But for this to be done efficiently, Canada, with the backing of all countries in North and South America, has proposed allowing the signals to be bounced off satellites. Currently, ground-based radars can track an aircraft, but coverage is spotty and fades when aircraft are out at sea or are flying below a certain altitude.
"We think there is broad global consensus on that agenda item and that it could be handled as early as next week," Anstrom added.
Australia resumed its search for MH370 last week and said with the weather improving in the area, the pace of the search was expected to pick up from this Friday. The search efforts will focus on an area calculated by a pilot veteran, Captain Simon Hardy, to be just outside the initial search area of 60,000 km2 (coordinates S39 22' 46" E087 6' 20"). “The impressive fact about Hardy’s mathematics is, despite hundreds of thousands of hits on the article containing his calculations, nobody has been able to blow a hole in them, commented Flightglobal editor, David Learmont, adding that by December 3, survey vessel Fugro Discovery was “expected to have completed the search of the area containing, according to Hardy’s calculations, the wreck of MH370”.
