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The more this story unfolds, the more I realize just how wrong I was about how I thought things like FlightAware and everything involved in tracking an airplane

The more this story unfolds, the more I realize just how wrong I was about how I thought things like FlightAware and everything involved in tracking an airplane works. What exactly is the barrier between just having two way satellite communications on every plane for the purposes of tracking and reporting its location?

jib 13y ago
Cost mostly if I got it right? The value in knowing the position doesn't justify equipping all airplanes with some kind of satellite position update system (the two-way part that is), and there is almost no value in that information outside freak incidents like this.
- jlmorton 13y ago
  In the United States, the FAA is implementing a program called NextGen Air Transportation System that would feature two-way, GPS-based satellite communication. There are numerous benefits outside of an accident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transportation_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transportat...
- joshberry 13y ago
  I would have to assume that at some point the cost of two dozen countries looking in between every nook and cranny of 1/3 of the planet exceeds the cost of a two-way position updating system, not to mention the value of being able to avoid even one disaster like this and whatever potential related disasters we have yet to see.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Yes, now that a plane has disappeared (instead of just being flown to a different airport and hostages kept; or being flown into a building) means that there is a reason to implement costly tracking devices that previously had little use. I used to build devices for aerospace. These were groundside, never ever airside. The systems (and thus costs) for building these devices were extensive and complex. Every item, every component, every screw, every washer, all the chemicals (paint, conformal coating, etc) could be traced from a finished unit (via its serial number) back through the manufacturing chain. When my company moved from a paperworks systems (suprisingly good) to computers (unsurprisingly flawed) they kept the paperwork system for these products because it was so important to never fail audit. It's easy to look at consumer grade off the shelf systems and think that the cost would be maybe four or five times higher, but I think the cost would be significantly greater. Add to that the difficulty of getting any component on a circuit diagram changed and the need to continue producing these units for every aircraft for many years and there's additional complication there.
vl 13y ago
The claim is that it's way to expensive to retrofit existing planes due to regulations: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/03/10/why-dont-we-have-streaming-data-from-the-missing-b777/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/03/10/why-dont-we-ha...
- foobarqux 13y ago
  I don't think that reasoning is correct. My comment on that blog was: I don’t think the fixed cost should be as high as you suggest because the functionality would (arguably) not be safety-critical, in contrast to your examples, and therefore subject to weaker regulations. Emergency geolocation doesn’t affect flight safety, only rescue operations. What happens if the new GPS location functionality fails? The only deleterious consequence is if the other locations systems fail (ELT) and the error causes, in the event that saving passengers is possible, for SAR to look in the wrong place when they otherwise would have looked in the correct one.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    > Emergency geolocation doesn’t affect flight safety, I am not sure of that. Consider the implications of an electrical fire. If the system can be turned off it wouldn't have helped here. If it couldn't be turned on then you have electrical fires killing people. I am not sure the problem of this incident can be fixed by looking at the plane. I think we need to know more about who, why, and how first.
    - foobarqux 13y ago
      I don't understand your comment. You need to read my comment in context of the linked blog post I was responding to which addressed only the cost of adding additional emergency geolocation and the reason why it was expensive. I suggest that it shouldn't actually be expensive because the safety impact is negligible.
Perdition 13y ago
What satellites are you using that have world wide coverage and enough bandwidth for this purpose? Such a system also wouldn't be immune to being disabled as the current tracking systems are. People need to learn to live with uncertainty instead of trying to remove it.
- trauco 13y ago
  I do not know how much bandwidth you would need to track the entire fleet of all major airlines (even if you, say, limited yourself to international and/or flights longer than X hours/km), but worldwide tracking of automated instrumentation (I'm an earth scientist) is done regularly. A few examples: - The iridium satellite network, which provides phone service, also provides a Short Burst Data service, which I suspect could be used for this purpose. - The Argo network tracks thousands of ocean drifters (http://www.argos-system.org/?nocache=0.9626778103411198 http://www.argos-system.org/?nocache=0.9626778103411198). Some of those drifters are using the Iridium network now.
  - Perdition 13y ago
    I didn't say it can't be done, I said the people arguing for real time satellite tracking haven't even examined whether it is feasible. Iridium only has ~8Mhz of bandwidth, that is fine for a sensor platform that probably only transmits a couple of times a day, but could quickly run into trouble with constant positional updates from thousands of planes (especially with streaming of cockpit data recorders, as has been argued for as well). And the saturation of the Iridium network is not something that can be controlled without extensive re-engineering to enable QOS.

jib 13y ago

Cost mostly if I got it right? The value in knowing the position doesn't justify equipping all airplanes with some kind of satellite position update system (the two-way part that is), and there is almost no value in that information outside freak incidents like this.

jlmorton 13y ago
In the United States, the FAA is implementing a program called NextGen Air Transportation System that would feature two-way, GPS-based satellite communication. There are numerous benefits outside of an accident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transportation_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transportat...
joshberry 13y ago
I would have to assume that at some point the cost of two dozen countries looking in between every nook and cranny of 1/3 of the planet exceeds the cost of a two-way position updating system, not to mention the value of being able to avoid even one disaster like this and whatever potential related disasters we have yet to see.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Yes, now that a plane has disappeared (instead of just being flown to a different airport and hostages kept; or being flown into a building) means that there is a reason to implement costly tracking devices that previously had little use. I used to build devices for aerospace. These were groundside, never ever airside. The systems (and thus costs) for building these devices were extensive and complex. Every item, every component, every screw, every washer, all the chemicals (paint, conformal coating, etc) could be traced from a finished unit (via its serial number) back through the manufacturing chain. When my company moved from a paperworks systems (suprisingly good) to computers (unsurprisingly flawed) they kept the paperwork system for these products because it was so important to never fail audit. It's easy to look at consumer grade off the shelf systems and think that the cost would be maybe four or five times higher, but I think the cost would be significantly greater. Add to that the difficulty of getting any component on a circuit diagram changed and the need to continue producing these units for every aircraft for many years and there's additional complication there.

vl 13y ago

The claim is that it's way to expensive to retrofit existing planes due to regulations: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/03/10/why-dont-we-have-streaming-data-from-the-missing-b777/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/03/10/why-dont-we-ha...

foobarqux 13y ago
I don't think that reasoning is correct. My comment on that blog was: I don’t think the fixed cost should be as high as you suggest because the functionality would (arguably) not be safety-critical, in contrast to your examples, and therefore subject to weaker regulations. Emergency geolocation doesn’t affect flight safety, only rescue operations. What happens if the new GPS location functionality fails? The only deleterious consequence is if the other locations systems fail (ELT) and the error causes, in the event that saving passengers is possible, for SAR to look in the wrong place when they otherwise would have looked in the correct one.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  > Emergency geolocation doesn’t affect flight safety, I am not sure of that. Consider the implications of an electrical fire. If the system can be turned off it wouldn't have helped here. If it couldn't be turned on then you have electrical fires killing people. I am not sure the problem of this incident can be fixed by looking at the plane. I think we need to know more about who, why, and how first.
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    I don't understand your comment. You need to read my comment in context of the linked blog post I was responding to which addressed only the cost of adding additional emergency geolocation and the reason why it was expensive. I suggest that it shouldn't actually be expensive because the safety impact is negligible.

Perdition 13y ago

What satellites are you using that have world wide coverage and enough bandwidth for this purpose? Such a system also wouldn't be immune to being disabled as the current tracking systems are. People need to learn to live with uncertainty instead of trying to remove it.

trauco 13y ago
I do not know how much bandwidth you would need to track the entire fleet of all major airlines (even if you, say, limited yourself to international and/or flights longer than X hours/km), but worldwide tracking of automated instrumentation (I'm an earth scientist) is done regularly. A few examples: - The iridium satellite network, which provides phone service, also provides a Short Burst Data service, which I suspect could be used for this purpose. - The Argo network tracks thousands of ocean drifters (http://www.argos-system.org/?nocache=0.9626778103411198 http://www.argos-system.org/?nocache=0.9626778103411198). Some of those drifters are using the Iridium network now.
- Perdition 13y ago
  I didn't say it can't be done, I said the people arguing for real time satellite tracking haven't even examined whether it is feasible. Iridium only has ~8Mhz of bandwidth, that is fine for a sensor platform that probably only transmits a couple of times a day, but could quickly run into trouble with constant positional updates from thousands of planes (especially with streaming of cockpit data recorders, as has been argued for as well). And the saturation of the Iridium network is not something that can be controlled without extensive re-engineering to enable QOS.