Well, I suppose this was inevitable, but can you say “Too Little Too Late?” Seriously, how long has the capability to continually track aircraft existed? And to anyone who might argue against it, is there EVER a reason we shouldn’t know where every commercial airliner is at any given moment?    ~Bill

New better-than-radar technology will boost aircraft tracking

By Barb Darrow

photo: Auckland Photo News Rodger McCutcheon

Summary:

No more lost planes? ADS-B offers much more accurate tracking of airplanes compared to radar — yes, even over water. It awaits certification but has already been mandated for use in the U.S. by 2020.

As aircraft from more than a dozen countries continue to search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, technology already being rolled out in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere could prevent a recurrence of a “lost” jet airliner.

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) technology promises more detailed tracking of planes than radar, even over water when planes are outside the scope of traditional radar. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has mandated that all commercial aircraft in the U.S. be equipped with ADS-B by 2020 — many newer planes already have it – and has deployed more than 600 ADS-B enabled ground stations nationwide. But it takes time to retrofit existing gear and to build infrastructure, and ADS-B is still wending its way through the certification — a process some ADS-B proponents hope will now be speeded up.

And some companies, including Globalstar, are pushing for adoption of “space-based” ADS-B which would send the signal up – to a satellite network — as well as down, for continuous global monitoring of planes regardless of location.

“There is no way a Boeing 777 should be able to go missing in this day and age,” said Skip Nelson, CEO of Anchorage-based ADS-B Technologies. His company has developed technology called ALAS or the ADS-B Link Augmentation System. With ALAS, the ADS-B signal is basically copied and forwarded to a satellite system so that an airliner would be visible over water, mountainous terrain, or other places where there are no ADS-B ground antennas.

Radar bounces energy off a plane and interprets the return to determine basic information about the aircraft. With ADS-B, the plane has a transceiver or transponder that gets global navigation or GPS position data and combines it with the plane’s side number, airline, heading, altitude, and airspeed,” he said. In the future ADS-B equipped jets would be signaling data to a set of ground stations — and to other planes — throughout their journeys.

“In the case of the Malaysian Airlines jet, we would have known that it was MA 370, a Boeing 777 and the ADS-B unit on the plane would be giving someone its information within 30 meters every second,” he said. ADS-B makes the plane “an active participant yelling its position to ground stations.”

via New better-than-radar technology will boost aircraft tracking — Tech News and Analysis.