The recent tragedy of the still-missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 has brought the tracking of aircraft sharply into focus, and at a conference last week in Montreal ICAO forged a consensus to develop aircraft tracking as matter of priority. While this is a welcome move, the ability to transmit more than just positional data is critical in allowing ground experts to not only determine the causes of losses, but also to give aircrew a better chance of averting a loss.
Continuous streaming of aircraft data has been possible for some time, but it comes at a high price and typically has high bandwidth demands. Flyht Aerospace Solutions (Booth 6242) has an elegant answer in the form of its Afirs (automated flight information reporting system), a virtually tamper-proof system that is already flying on around 350 aircraft, although not all have streaming capability.
More In Avionics
