Inmarsat offers free aircraft tracking in wake of MH370
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Satellite communications company Inmarsat has said it will offer free aircraft tracking to airlines, in the wake of the tragedy of flight MH370.
The UK-based company revealed on Sunday that it has made the proposal to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), as part of new measures to improve aviation safety. Inmarsat will also offer a new cloud-based black box service that will store data from an aircraft’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
The announcement was made ahead of a conference on aircraft tracking being hosted by ICAO in Montreal on Monday 12 May 2014.
“We welcome and strongly support ICAO’s decision to place the delivery of next-generation aviation safety services at the heart of the industry’s agenda at its meeting on 12th May,” said Rupert Pearce, CEO of Inmarsat.
“Inmarsat has been providing global aviation safety services for over 20 years and we are confident that the proposals we have presented to ICAO and IATA represent a major contribution to enhancing aviation safety services on a global basis. In the wake of the loss of MH370, we believe this is simply the right thing to do.”
The tracking service will be offered to all 11,000 long-haul passenger aircraft – virtually the entire global fleet. And Inmarsat said its new measures could be implemented “right away”, as they utilise equipment already installed on the vast majority of these aircraft.
In addition to the free tracking service, Inmarsat will also a “black box in the cloud” service, which can be used to stream historic and real-time flight data from an aircraft’s black boxes.
This move marks the second black box advancement since MH370; the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) recently unveiled plans to increase the amount of recording time for cockpit voice recorders, and to extend the battery life of the black box ‘pingers’, to give search teams more time to locate the beacons.
Inmarsat’s satellite data played a vital role in discovering the whereabouts of flight MH370 after it lost contact with air traffic controllers.
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