Originally Posted by
Derfred
I've followed this entire thread and there is one point that seems to have been missed about Inmarsat supposedly offering free tracking for airlines.
Narrow body aircraft such as the A320 and B737 do not have satellite coms as standard equipment. It is a customer option (read: expensive). Most airlines do not order it. Perhaps it is standard equipment on wide bodies but that would not have helped in this incident.
So to suggest that as a cheap option for narrow body airliners is ignoring a glaring fact.
But in this case the aircraft although over water was in good line-of-sight (LOS) of land with VHF and therefore VHF Data Link (VDL) . Most of ACARS is done over VDL whenever in LOS of ground stations. The tracking could be done on VDL.
Oceanic areas are starting to mandate FANS (ADS-C, CPDLC) via SATCOM I suspect that most oceanic areas will mandate FANS within a few years and that any aircraft flying out of LOS of land will be required to be fitted with FANS/SATCOM. There are a surprising number of single-aisle aircraft flying transatlantic.