Published on Wednesday, 12 March 2014 09:59
PIC: ReutersKUALA LUMPUR:
Four days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished somewhere between
Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, its fate remains unknown, adding a cruel
uncertainty to the grief of the families and friends of the 239 people
onboard.
PIC: ReutersKUALA LUMPUR:
Four days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished somewhere between
Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, its fate remains unknown, adding a cruel
uncertainty to the grief of the families and friends of the 239 people
onboard.
Planes, ships and satellites from ten
countries—the US, for instance, has dispatched two destroyers, an oiler
and a patrol plane—are conducting an extensive and expensive search. Yet
much of the excruciating mystery surrounding the plane’s loss could
have been averted if the recommendations ensuing from an earlier crash
had been followed.
On June 1, 2009, an Air France Airbus
A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared off the coast of
Brazil. It took five days to find the site of the crash—and two more
years to retrieve the plane’s data recorders from waters some 3,900m
deep.
Three years after that tragedy, France’s
air-accident investigation bureau issued its final report, with more
than 40 recommendations. Many relate to the specific circumstances that
led to the plane’s crash, and it’s not yet clear whether they would be
relevant to the Malaysia Airlines flight.
There is at least one area, however,
where their applicability is glaringly apparent: the recording and
transmission of flight data. In particular, the bureau recommended that
the European Aviation Safety Agency and the International Civil Aviation
Organization “make mandatory as quickly as possible, for aeroplanes
making public transport flights with passengers over maritime or remote
areas, triggering of data transmission to facilitate localisation as
soon as an emergency situation is detected on board.”
Such systems exist, but airlines have
balked at the expense of installation (which one manufacturer put at
less than US$100,000, or RM329,155, per aircraft) and the cost of
transmitting and storing huge amounts of data.
Yet, the bureau was not recommending
continuous transmission, but rather “triggered transmission”—when, say,
there are unusual changes in a plane’s attitude (a steep bank, for
instance), speed or proximity to the ground.
A working group of more than 150 people
gathered from manufacturers to regulators concluded that such a system
could detect anomalies as they happen, and that “nuisance
transmissions”—that is, false alarms—could be all but eliminated.
The stream of data would not only make
travel safer, but also help companies save money on maintenance and fuel
efficiency. Cheaper but still effective would be off-the-shelf
technology that continually transmits, in short bursts, just a plane’s
position and velocity when it’s over water and out of radar range.
The International Civil Aviation
Organization, an unwieldy group that moves more like an aircraft carrier
than a jet, has so far not made triggered transmission part of its
standards and recommended practices.
Nor does it seem to have speedily
adopted some of the report’s many other sensible recommendations—on
coordinating and training for search and rescue efforts, for instance,
or requiring all underwater locating beacons to send transmissions for
90 days.
Which leaves a question that will linger
after Flight 370 is found: How many more planes will have to vanish
before that happens?
Bloomberg
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