Originally Posted by
susier
'Perhaps the issue of who pays should be given more priority in the discussions that are currently in progress in the pan-national aviation organizations that are all coming up with various bureaucratic regulations on tamper-proof aircraft tracking.'
Forgive me, but something I have been wondering - was there a tangible demand for this sort of facility prior to March this year? Or is it a very recent phenomenon that has come about in the light of this event - a reaction to it specifically, rather than an idea that was around for some time and just required a 'push' in order to get to the top of the list?
The French BEA report on AF447 - a similar case of an aircraft in open sea which was very difficult to find - made the recommendation that the periodic updates from ADS-C should be at closer intervals. The intent being that they would be close enough to narrow the search area to something useful.
This was not done as the airlines did not want to spend the extra money they thought they would be paying for SATCOM transmissions. After all a crash in the sea without position reports was very rare and the chances of that happening to their aircraft meant that it wasn't worth it.
Anyway the search costs are not borne by the airline.
So the beancounters were not going to pay.
Along comes MH370. This is a real trigger for the regulators to get their act together as people are now saying- look its happened again! Perhaps not quite fair as apart from both (we think both) ditching in the sea there are no other commonalities. But the regulators (together with keen avionics marketers ) are now pushing for tamper proof tracking that would meet the AF447 recommendations _and_ prevent the loss of position reporting of MH370.
The problem is that we still don't know why or what MH370 did whatever it did. Perhaps all that is needed is to set the ADS-C period to say 4 minutes and ACARS to always report over SATCOM certain emergencies. This would provide all the tracking and information needs for 99% of incidents including MH370 without any new avionics and thanks to INMARSAT's offer of 'free' tracking it would not cost the airlines.
This is why it would be really really helpful to find the airframe.