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I worked in the airborne geophysics business before this. Their dismal air safety record meant that there was much value in improving standards. As part of thi
by fruzz 12y ago
I worked in the airborne geophysics business before this. Their dismal air safety record meant that there was much value in improving standards.
As part of this, they had a system that tracked the aircraft globally in real-time. I implemented part of the software for this. Aircrafts sent their GPS coordinates and basic telemetry every 45 seconds over Iridium. I got it in my servers a minute later.
If the aircraft position stopped being reported for ten minutes, or the system detected anomalous flying conditions (eg. Suspected crash), or the pilots pressed a big red button, the system contacted a hierarchy of people by phone. They'd then call the pilots directly within minutes, over the Iridium network.
This cost us very little to operate. I was very surprised that large airliners did not have such a system in place.
- wglb 12y agoI am wondering if one of the considerations is the sheer volume of air traffic these days. The bandwidth requirements seem to be rather large.
- fruzz 12y agoI don't know. It wasn't much consumption though. For our traffic, we were looking at a hundred bytes per minute, per aircraft, during normal operations. Enough to send coordinates, speed, direction, power state, engine state, etc. During unusual activity, the amount of telemetry increased (to narrow down the area for a search and rescue efforts) but it still was in the hundreds of bytes per minute.