Following recent difficulties in tracking the missing Malaysia Air Flight MH370 and AirAsia Flight QZ8501, various media outlets have raised the question of whether new technology may be able to aid authorities in tracking down missing aircraft.
Space-based air traffic surveillance systems provide a promising improvement on how airplanes are tracked.
Currently, airplanes and air traffic control towers communicate via radar. A primary radar system automatically detects the current position of a plane using radio signals. A secondary radar system relies on the plane to supply information such as the altitude and speed of the aircraft through a transponder in the cockpit. This information can only be conveyed through radio signals as well, which has its limitations. Although communicating via radio signals works well when airplanes are traveling over land, radio coverage fades when an aircraft is more than 240 km from land. Radio signals are also affected by the earth’s curvature and a plane’s altitude.
Ground crew can also gather information about a particular craft by analyzing information from the plane’s black boxes, a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder often located at the tail-end of the aircraft. If a plane is underwater, the black boxes can send ultrasonic signals that indicate the location of the plane. However, these signals also have a limited range.
Over the past decade, a new GPS-based system called Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, or ADS-B, has become more widely used. With this system, planes determine their location via satellite navigation and then relay that information to the ground through radio waves via another type of transponder on the aircraft. However, such systems also do not work when the plane is too far from land and from air traffic control towers.
U.S.-based company Aireon, a subsidiary of Iridium Communications, Inc., has developed a space-based air traffic surveillance system known as Aircraft Locating and Emergency Response Tracking, or ALERT. Iridium satellites host ADS-B payloads and send GPS data from the plane to Aireon ground facilities as well as air traffic control towers.
ALERT will be able to track any aircraft flying in areas where surveillance is currently impossible using Iridium’s satellite technology, which already encompasses a network of 66 low orbiting telecommunications satellites. It will use existing ADS-B systems on aircraft to provide real-time tracking data.
Since the satellites cover such a large expanse of the earth’s airspace, ALERT will be able to provide surveillance over remote airspace areas, including areas unreached by current radar-based technologies. Aireon’s satellite surveillance technology will be fully operational by 2017.
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