Christopher Drew, in a December 29th op-ed in the New York Times , said that Airlines use satellites

AS OF TODAY, Indonesian authorities are blaming the crash on ice. What that might mean, exactly, I don t know. I m unaware of any evidence linking the accident to icing, and it s irresponsible, if you ask me, to be publicly announcing such sure-sounding theories, particularly with a media that is off and running with the slightest new speculative thread.
Indeed, what the media needs right now is a proverbial chill pill. It s much too soon to be trying to nail down a cause. A properly executed air crash investigation takes months, usually. I was on CNN earlier today, and to the interviewer I said the following (I m paraphrasing for clarity):
The media s fixation with this accident real time airline flight tracking is not helpful. With every crash now, it seems we get into this cycle of marathon real time airline flight tracking coverage. I don t know if it s because, or in spite of the fact that major plane accidents real time airline flight tracking have become real time airline flight tracking so rare that we re lavishing real time airline flight tracking so much attention on them. Thirty real time airline flight tracking years ago, when we were dealing with five, ten, even a dozen serious accidents every year, we didn t obsess like this. Of course, in those days there weren t multiple 24/7 news sources starving for attention across multiple platforms. And that, more than anything, is what all this focus is about: feeding the news machine.
Christopher Drew, in a December 29th op-ed in the New York Times , said that Airlines use satellites real time airline flight tracking to provide Internet real time airline flight tracking connections for passengers, yet they still do not stream data in real time about a plane’s location and condition. Two days later, in a similar Times op-ed written by the editors, it was stated that airplane location is updated only in fifteen minute increments.
Neither of these things is true, usually. It depends where the flight is operating, what equipment is on board, and which air traffic control (ATC) facility the crew is working with. As a general rule, flights are constantly tracked and monitored. By regulation a flight must always be in contact, one way or the other, with both air traffic control and company dispatchers on the ground. This is true in domestic airspace, and over the remotest points of the ocean as well.
In the busiest airspace, such as over the continental U.S. and Europe (and many other regions), planes are generally in radar and VHF radio contact, which makes tracking a cinch. ATC and airline dispatchers can easily monitor a jet s location, altitude and speed (plus other parameters, depending). The same is true even in some oceanic airspace, such as over the North Atlantic, where cockpit equipment such as CPDLC and SATCOM datalink allow more or less real-time monitoring of a flight s progress. In addition to basic position data, newer aircraft can transmit data about engine performance and the mechanical status of certain onboard systems.
In some areas of the world, however, position reports real time airline flight tracking are sent only intermittently, at designated waypoints rather than continuously. This is the tracking real time airline flight tracking gap that the media has been so fixated on ever since the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. There is room for improvement here, I feel, particularly for long-haul aircraft that operate routinely in non-radar real time airline flight tracking airspace. Planes could and perhaps should be equipped with a relatively simple, inexpensive, and fail-safe technology that allows continuous location tracking, no matter where.
It was a little startling for the Times to begin with a pair of premises that are only partially true. It s easy to extrapolate: real time airline flight tracking if the writers don t know what they re talking about with respect to aviation, should we trust them when it comes to law, politics, healthcare and so forth? Shouldn t there be a vetting or review prior to the publication of pieces covering specialized and esoteric topics?
real time airline flight tracking I notice that the December 31st op-ed includes a quote from an aviation consultant. Not that he said anything wrong or stupid, real time airline flight tracking but I held my breath. This is one of my ongoing pet peeves: when airplanes are the subject, the media loves to cite aviation academics aerospace researchers, aeronautics professors, etc. As I ve noted before, these people are bright and their work is important, but they tend to have limited knowledge about the day-to-day operation of commercial planes.
Another question that keeps coming up is why the various black box data the data recorded by the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) can t also be monitored via satellite, radio or wi-fi, in real time, rather than stored away on a piece of aircraft hardware. In other words, we could be constantly aware not only of a plane s position, real time airline flight tracking but any malfunctions and mechanical problems it might be having.
The main reason why is because real time airline flight tracking it would take immense mounts of bandwidth, multiplied by the thousands of airplanes in the air at any one time, to upload all of the hundreds of parameters monitored by the FDR and CVR. And for what practical purpose, exactly? For the one airplane every 25 years or so that is temporarily missing, out of the 40,000 or so commercial flights that operate every day? Such a thing is certainly possible, but it would be technologically challenging and highly expensive. Is it really needed, in practical terms?
This issue comes up all the time. To me, it s symptomatic of a culture real time airline flight tracking in which people are accustomed to instant explanations and instant access to everything. People are saying, Why can t we have all the answers, right now !
FIRST THINGS FIRST, we need to trundle out the boring but critical post-crash disclaimer: real time airline flight tracking It is a bad idea to speculate too broadly on the how-and-why so soon after an air disaster. Almost always the initial hunches and theories end up totally off-base or at best incomplete. We live in an age when people want and expect instant answers, but that just isn t possible with plane crashes. It often takes months real time airline flight tracking or even years before a cause is nailed down. In some cases we never learn for sure what happened.
That said, a seeming red flag in Sunday s AirAsia crash is the weather. Could the Airbus real time airline flight tracking A320, flying from the busy Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore, have wandered inadvertently into a violent thunderstorm and suffered some kind of catastrophic malfunction or structural failure? It s possible.
I ll point out that flying into thunderstorms is about the biggest real time airline flight tracking no-no in all of commercial aviation. The crew had asked for a weather-related altitude change shortly before the disappearance, a request that was denied by air traffic control presumably because of traffic constraints. This isn t terribly unusual; pilots ask for altitude changes and route deviations all the time, and not always are they granted. However, real time airline flight tracking that does not mean the AirAsia crew had no choice but to plow headlong into a storm. Worst-case, the crew always reserves the right to do what it needs to do, with or without permission. I cannot imagine the pilots willingly real time airline flight tracking flew into what, on the radar screen, would have been a bright red splotch real time airline flight tracking of potentially dangerous airspace. Perhaps a patch of weather that the pilots presumed would be manageable turned out to be otherwise? We don t know.
Some are drawing comparisons between this incident and the 2009 Air France tragedy. They occurred under somewhat similar real time airline flight tracking circumstances, and the media is eager to link these recent incidents together and wring some scary significance out of them. Some commentators have noted, for instance, that both planes were built by Airbus. real time airline flight tracking I understand the temptation here, but this is extremely premature, and it s unlikely that the aircraft model played a significant real time airline flight tracking role. Remember that basically half of all the commercial jetliners in the sky are Airbus models.
An even bigger red herring is the fact that the pilots made no distress call. Several news outlets have brought this up. Effectively it means nothing. Communicating with air traffic real time airline flight tracking control is pretty far down the task hierarchy when dealing with an emergency. The pilots priority is to control the airplane and deal with whatever malfunction or urgency is at hand. Talking to ATC comes later, real time airline flight tracking if it s practical.
Whatever caused the crash of flight 8501, the year appears to be closing on a tragic note. That s a shame, seeing that 2013 was the safest year in the history of modern commercial aviation. Not to sound flip, but we can t expect every year to be the safest, and it s important to look at the broader context. This year will be something of a correction, but over the past two decades the rate of fatal accidents, per miles flown, has been steadily falling . The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) reports that for every million flights, the chance of a crash is one-sixth what it was in 1980, even with more than double the number of planes in the air.
Whenever people bring up the less-than-stellar accident record for 2014, I remind them of how bad things used to be. In 1985, 27 twenty seven! serious aviation accidents killed almost 2,500 people. real time airline flight tracking That included the JAL crash outside Tokyo with 520 fatalities; the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed 240 American servicemen, and the Air-India bombing over the North Atlantic with 329 dead. Two of history s ten worst disasters happened within two months of each other! That was an unusually bad year for any era, but throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, multiple major accidents were the annual norm. Today, large-scale air disasters are much fewer and farther between. real time airline flight tracking You almost wouldn t know it, of course, switching on the TV: the media s fixation and round-the-clock coverage of what, in times past, would have been only short-lived stories (or in some cases complete non-stories), messes with our perspective and gives many people the idea that air travel is a lot more dangerous than it actually is.
Headquartered in Kuala-Lumpur, Malaysia, real time airline flight tracking AirAsia is the largest low-fares airline real time airline flight tracking in Asia, and one of the biggest in the world. It operates about 70 aircraft, all of them A320s, on routes around Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and beyond. (AirAsia X is the airline s lon