Missing Flight MH370 Update: Real-Time Tracking of Aircrafts to Prevent Another Disappearance
Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Malaysia's prime minister has asked international aviation regulators to consider the implementation of real-time tracking of airplanes to avoid any other tragedy like the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. He has admitted that the search and rescue operations started out slow as well as the confused message to people were a mistake.
However, Datuk mentioned that the aviation industry needs changes that would make it difficult for an airplane to disappear.
New Strait Times noted that earlier this week, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) held a meeting to discuss the need of cloud storage of black box information, real-time tracking of airliners and other new methods to safeguard the aircraft.
The Malaysian prime minister wondered that an aircraft the size of a Boeing 777 can disappear without a trace.
"In an age of smartphones and mobile Internet, real-time tracking of commercial airplanes is long overdue," said Datuk.
On March 8, the Boeing 777 MH370 disappeared with 239 people after diverting from the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route.
The premier of Malaysia also suggested that the battery life of aircraft location beacons for the data recorders must be extended as well as the capacity of cockpit voice recorders.
Currently, the battery life of location beacons is about 30 days.
These changes were proposed after Air France flight 447 crashed in 2009 in the Atlantic and 228 people lost their lives.
"These changes may not have prevented the MH370 or Air France 447 tragedies. But they would make it harder for an aircraft to simply disappear, and easier to find any aircraft that did," said the prime minister, adding, "The global aviation industry must not only learn the lessons of MH370 but implement them. The world learned from Air France but didn't act. The same mistake must not be made again."
The prime minister also assured that his government would investigate the Malaysian air traffic controllers in order to find out why it took four hours to start a search and rescue operation after first noticing that MH370 was missing.