GPS Tracking

Experts: Time to Push For Aviation System Based on Satellite GPS Tracking

Before Air France Flight 447 went down June 1 off the northeast coast of Brazil with 228 people aboard, most air travelers didn’t know that there are certain places in the world where passenger jets lose radar contact for long periods of time, especially over oceans.

A week passed between the first report that the four-year-old plane was missing and the recovery of bodies and wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean. Now, the general public and the news media are asking some prying questions. Among them: How could a commercial airline and the two involved countries (Rio De Janeiro, Brazil and Paris, France, the flight’s intended destination) lose something as big as an aircraft, for such a long period of time?

The current technology linking commercial pilots to their Air Traffic Control crews is ground-based radar, and the system is essentially the same as it was in the 1940s, explained Steve Moehling, vice president of sales for LandAirSea Systems, a Woodstock, IL-based designer and manufacturer of GPS tracking systems.

Like many other vehicles, airplanes can, and do, get location information from the GPS satellite system orbiting in space, Moehling said. But the commercial airline industry has been in no hurry to integrate it and they continue to rely on the Earth-bound radar.

LandAirSea has not only been a leader in the GPS tracking market since 1994; its leaders are experts on the subject of GPS tracking for aviation. LandAirSea’s first product in 1996, Flight-Trac, was created for flight schools. It was a passive flight analysis GPS device that recorded data and recreated conditions of a flight from a cockpit view, including instrumentation. In addition, Moehling has a degree in aviation management and both Moehling and President and Chief Executive Officer of LandAirSea Systems Rob Wagner are private pilots.

“It’s an absolute necessity to integrate GPS tracking into commercial aviation now – at least in trans-Atlantic flights,” Moehling said.

Moehling predicted the tragedy over the Atlantic will pressure the Federal Aviation Administration and other international aviation regulatory agencies to address the communications deficiencies of international travel, much the same way it changed airline security measures after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“In aviation, everything is fine until there’s a disaster,” Moehling said. “And the problem is the airlines won’t do anything until they are mandated (especially when those improvements are very cost-prohibitive).”

Much Remains Unknown About Flight

Investigators, the flying public, aircraft manufacturers and of course the surviving families are some of the groups eager to find out what went wrong on the flight. So far, experts are only speculating as to the cause, with possibilities including electrical failure, a structural problem and lightning strike.

The Air France plane crashed after entering a dangerous flight area near the equator called the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone. It’s a region where weather patterns of the northern and southern hemispheres meet and often clash, resulting in extremely stormy and unpredictable weather.

It was during this critical time that the plane lost contact with the ground.

Flight 447, as is typical in the industry, was tracked by ground-based radar. The technology has been used since World War II. Radar’s range is limited to about 100 to 150 miles off shore. Once past that range, pilots are required to radio in their positions at predetermined points along the flight path. Based on that information, controllers assign the planes “lanes” and speeds of travel while over the ocean to make sure there is enough space between flights.

“The mid-oceans are one of the remotest parts of the world…” said John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “When you’re over the ocean, you are really pretty much on your own.”

There was obviously some type of satellite communication system in place in the plane, for weather reports and position and emergency transmissions. The pilot did indicate that the plane was entering the storm zone. And at one point the Airbus sent a series of automatic maintenance warnings that there were electrical problems and that a loss of cabin pressure had occurred. But those were not read until after the accident. The plane was in distress, and no one on the ground knew exactly where, or why.

Communication is one thing and remote viewing of location, live by GPS tracking, is another.

GPS tracking is already integrated into certain aspects of aviation. It is commonly used in corporate jets and is being tested by a few carriers in different parts of the country, LandAirSea’s Moehling said.

Would a universal satellite GPS tracking system have resulted in a different outcome for Air France Flight 447?

Moehling said he doesn’t think onboard GPS tracking could have prevented the disaster, especially because there was a serious weather factor that could not be controlled. But, at the very least, officials would have received specific coordinates that would have significantly narrowed the search area. This would give the recovery crews a better chance of recovering the “black boxes,” or flight data recorders. Only then would officials know what happened to the aircraft when tragedy struck.

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Tags: Air France, Black Boxes, GPS Tracking

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 10:05 am and is filed under All Articles, GPS Tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.