Originally Posted by
YYZjim
Professional pilots should bear in mind that the MH370 S&R fiasco will likely result in the public's demanding changes. It might be wise for professional pilots to propose their own solution, rather than wait for governments and regulators to impose new rules. Perhaps the pilots' unions should propose that:
1. the automatic reporting system installed by the airframe manufacturer, which transmits data through the Inmarsat satellite system, be modified so that it sends a GPS position as well as hull data;
2. that the frequency of the Inmarsat reports be increased from every half-hour to, say, once every ten minutes;
3. that this reporting system be tied to the aircraft's main power bus (and thus placed outside human control); and
4. that the pilots' unions would pay the marginal cost which, at $2.00 per transmission, is not very much at all.
lots of unanswered questions.
Who's going to pay for the monitoring, and storage (and retrieval) of all this data, and who's going to monitor it in case 1 aircraft stops transmitting (for whatever reason), and even if they did detect an anomoly, who are they going to notify?
Even if they had access to 24*7 military numbers for every country, would they scramble jets on the say so of a civilian company who says one of the aircraft it monitors didn't "check in" ?