Made-in-Canada solution for holes in world radar coverage

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – If there’s anything to be learned from the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, it’s that the industry’s current system of monitoring commercial aircraft has some gaping holes that need to be fixed.

“The air navigation system we have now is based mostly on World War II technology, which is radar,” says Chris Sorenson with Maclean’s Magazine, who has been looking at a Canadian solution that will fill those gaps.

“Radar works pretty well where it’s deployed, which is over land areas, but you can’t put radar stations in the middle of the ocean. One thing that has come up in the search for Flight 370 is that as soon as something happened to the plane and its tracking and transponder systems went offline, civil aviation authorities had no way to follow it. Once it got out over the Indian Ocean, they were really only piecing together clues based on bits of satellite data that were being sent in periodically,” he tells News1130.

That data only sent information about engine performance, a service that airlines pay to subscribe to. There is currently no satellite system monitoring where planes are flying at any given minute around the globe.

“Mostly, it’s an issue of cost,” says Sorenson. “Think of the price of making a satellite phone call — it is fairly expensive. If you have something like 90,000 flights a day, all of them sending location data every second, it is going to quickly add up.”

One potential solution comes from Nav Canada, the country’s air navigation services provider. It has partnered with a satellite company to equip a new generation of 66 communications satellites with receivers that will collect signals from airplane transponders, even if they’re flying over an ocean.

“Nav Canada has struck a partnership agreement, not paying to launch their own satellites but piggybacking on ones that are going up anyway. With that Nav Canada will provide, basically for the first time in history, global coverage for air traffic controllers, including over the oceans.”

The system is expected to be up and running over the North Atlantic by 2018. Other companies have proposed “real-time” black-box recorders that would see airlines transmit a constant stream of data about their systems to the ground.

While the satellite system was conceived as a way to safely fit more flights on efficient routes, Sorenson says there will certainly be more calls for constant monitoring of planes in the wake of the disappearance of Malaysia Airline Flight 370.

“I think it’s inevitable. There will be demand for some kind of system that’s always on, that can track these flights all around the world so that when something does go wrong, we will know, roughly, where to send searchers to start looking for it.”

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