GADSS Set New Standards for On-Board Flight Tracker Technologies

With this March having marked two years on from Malaysia Airlines’ MH370 disappearance, this year’s Airlines Electronic Engineering Committee (AEEC) and Avionics Maintenance Committee’s (AMC) general session unsurprisingly focused on flight tracking. In particular, analysing all evidence in order to create an onboard standard when it comes to required flight tracking technology. Fully endorsed by the Global Aeronautical Distress Safety System mandate (GADSS), the new provisional standards support the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s (ICAO) plans to improve the aircraft tracking of global airlines and individual flights.

Being set up after the MH370 disappearance, GADSS aims to achieve the consensus that airline flights are required to be trackable regardless of their location or destination. Since its formulation, the organisation has been working to implement the requirement for airlines to be able to provide ground staff with specific location and flight tracking information every 15 minutes. Such standards serve to enable those planes in distress to be easily located and for a timely recovery of flight and cockpit voice data to be achieved. All this aims to avoid a recurrence of the MH370 incident.

The New Provisional Onboard Flight Tracker Standards

Following March’s general session, Charles Adler – a senior engineer at Boeing – outlined the following provisions with regards to aircraft tracking technologies: see here for full lists of proposed standards.

1. By January 2018, all commercial flying planes should be fully equipped with a 90-day low-frequency underwater locator device.
2. By November 2018, every 15 minutes operators should be capable of tracking aircraft in normal flight conditions – with abnormal flight tracking options available.
3. Come 2021, all new airframes will be able to produce and transmit location-based reports every minute when the aircraft is experiencing abnormal flight conditions. These should be not isolatable and independent of aircraft power.
4. From 2021, all aircraft design should integrate features to enable the timely recovery of flight data e.g. automatically deployable flight recorders and/or in-flight data streaming.

Full Visibility Already Achievable with Plane Finder’s Flight Tracker

Although the above standards are set to be newly introduced, with Plane Finder’s data, desktop and mobile flight trackers you can already live-track any plane or track past flights for full visibility.

You can download our Flight Tracking App from the Play Store or App Store. Alternatively, head to our website for our desktop flight tracker and accessibility to the Plane Finder Aviation Database – the most accurate collection of real-time aviation data available on the Internet.