Tracking would not have saved any lives here. And so you can argue that tracking is irrelevant.
On the other hand, it seems suboptimal to say
'We lost the aircraft at 24000 (or whatever it was) as it disappeared under the horizon. It could have hit the ocean very close to that point. It could have hit the ocean some distance away. Or something else may have happened." What relatives are going to find this acceptable?
With so many transoceanic flights, it is
ridiculous that we
repeatedly have the following situation:
1. We don't know exactly where the aircraft went down. The plane wasn't being tracked - although it could easily have been. The ELT should have activated on impact, but the antenna may have been sheared off and anyway ELTs can't be detected underwater.
2. The acoustic pingers are extremely short range, and if in deep ocean we will only hear them if we are directly overhead. In other words, the pingers rely on knowing the precise location of the wreck. That's on top of the inadequate battery life.
I accept that in an AF447 situation (and likely also AirAsia), pilots won't have time to communicate. Their priority is to try and recover the situation. But given this truism, it is equally
ridiculous that automated systems are not activated until they are either destroyed by impact or rendered ineffective by sinking into deep water. Even a few hits from a 406 ELT during the final few minutes would be helpful in knowing something was wrong and knowing where the plane was at the time. Surely it is possible to come up with some parameters where this was triggered.
The fact is that the technology used today is really designed to find aircraft that have crashed on land or small bodies of water. They are completely inadequate for finding a plane in an ocean - which cover 2/3 of the planets surface.
I think most of us would agree (at least in principle) that this is suboptimal and frankly unacceptable. Surely we can do better than this.
IanW
ALL aircraft have tracking capability. All that is needed is regulation that mandates aircraft operators use the tracking capability that is already on the aircraft.
True, and this
will come. All these systems can be turned off however, which I suspect was the thinking behind someones suggestion for an independent system not connected to aircraft power.
727forever
Tracking devices that can be turned off by crew or other persons and render the aircraft invisible except to ground radar is out of date thinking.
Probably a difficult call. On one side we have arguments about electrical faults and fire and needing the capability to isolate all electrical equipment. On the other side we have MH370 and I guess also 9/11.
Whatever we think here, IanW is right. This will happen - and sooner than many people anticipate.