Originally Posted by MountainBear
According to the article below the only ping that originated in the aircraft was the final "partial ping". All the other pings were initiated by the ground station.
That statement happens to be correct. I have found that depending on the volume of satellite Aero traffic, the GES will delay the interrogation packet, and the GES software will reset the next time.
I have also found that the Malaysian fleet have been, or are using the FANS SAT ADSC system, which ensures that the open source ACARS code is actually encoded, and therefore privileged info such as the RR data remains that way. When using FANS, each AES to GES transaction includes a basic lat, long, alt report.
The only RR reports were sent on take-off and top of climb, and were routed via VHF ACARS.