Why Did Flight MH370 Have Outdated Technology Aboard?
The following article was originally written in its entirety by
How do airlines provide Wi-Fi for their passengers? Well, they routinely use satellites to do this. But for years
they have failed to use a similar technology for a far more basic task:
tracking planes and their black-box flight recorders.
Long
before Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished, the global
airline industry did have sophisticated tools that could follow planes (in
real time) and stream data from their flight recorders. But for a variety
of reasons, mostly involving cost and also how infrequently planes crash,
neither the airlines nor their regulators have adopted them.
One
of the haunting questions about Flight 370 was how authorities could actually lose
track of a Boeing 777 jetliner in an age when an iPhone can be located in
moments. The
idea of tracking airplanes in flight or using deployable black boxes
that can broadcast their location via satellites has been around for years and gained popular attention after the 2009 Air France jet crashed in the
Atlantic Ocean. If you remember, it took investigators two years to locate that plane.
“The
technology is out there, but it’s just a question of political will to
recognize this is important,” said Mark Rosenker, a former chairman of
the National Transportation Safety Board and a retired Air Force major
general. “What hasn’t improved is that we still have to wait to recover
those boxes to begin accident investigations. Precious days are wasted.”
But
while the technology has proved invaluable in countless accidents that had the technology, the
flight recorders must first be recovered to be of any use. “It
is shocking to find ourselves in the same situation of not being able
to locate an airplane,” said Robert Soulas, who lost his daughter and
son-in-law in the Air France crash. (1)
Despite all of the awesome
technology that mankind has developed, it’s amazing that it is still possible for a Boeing
777 with 239 people on board to vanish. It’s mind
blowing that all we have to go on is the plane’s radar signature — and
even then, that last radar reading was so poor that the search area is
thousands of square miles of open water. Surely, given the fact that we
can track a smartphone or a missing iPad anywhere on Earth down to a few meters. (2)
We live in a day and age where GPS (and other radio
triangulation methods) can track your smartphone to within a few meters,
almost anywhere on Earth. With dedicated, land-based tracking networks,
vehicles and devices can be tracked to within a few centimeters. Even
in the absence of GPS or radio tracking, inertial guidance (dead
reckoning) has been accurate enough since the ’60s to accurately land a
nuclear ICBM on the other side of the planet, or put the Apollo mission
into space. (2)
So why aren't we be able to track a vehicle that has the lives of 239 people aboard, who seemingly vanished off the face of the earth? And it doesn't also seem to matter which airline that you choose, you'll still be lost, and your loved ones may never know what happened. It seems foolish, even down right negligible by the airlines not to allow this to come to pass.
So, it sounds like it's time for us to start talking to our legislators asking them to invoke a positive action in our traveling favor.
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