In the fire service, it is said that the rule book is written with the blood of dead firefighters. In other words, every rule and guideline that exists is there because someone got hurt or killed. It’s a morbid but useful reminder that, even in failure, we can always learn something.
The same is true in aviation. The problem when it comes to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people aboard, is that there’s no wreckage to show us what went wrong, and how to avoid the same problem. But that lack of evidence, and the frustration that comes with getting nothing from the most expensive search operation in history, has its own lessons. And changes are already in place to help us the next time a plane vanishes.
For months, investigators have been using an obscure piece of data from satellite communications provider Inmarsat to narrow down their search for the doomed Boeing 777, which is presumably somewhere at the bottom of the vast Indian Ocean. Previously, that data was generated once per hour, when one of Inmarsat’s satellites did something called the “Log-on Interrogation” (LOI), also called a handshake request. It’s basically a satellite saying, “Hello plane, are you still there?” The result generates an hourly location marker. In the case of MH370, that information helped investigators narrow down their search area, but left them with a vast amount of ocean to cover.
Now Inmarsat has announced it will increase the frequency of its handshake requests with aircraft from once an hour to every 15 minutes. That change increases its plane tracking capabilities fourfold, so the next time a plane disappears, it should be easier to find. At the very least, investigators will have much more detailed information about where it was last “seen.”
This isn’t the first time the mysterious fate of an airliner has pushed Inmarsat to change its policies, even though the British company isn’t in the business of helping us find planes that go missing in the first place. It offers in-flight communications and Internet connectivity for private and commercial aircraft, using its 11 commercial satellites in geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles above the Earth.
The handshake requests between its satellites and planes in flight weren’t used to locate aircraft at all until Air France 447 disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Although some debris and bodies from the plane were spotted within a few days of the crash, the main part of the wreckage, including the black boxes that eventually revealed what happened, wasn’t found until nearly two years later.
It was during that search that Inmarsat began recording something called the Burst Timing Offset, or BTO, when communicating with aircraft on its network. The BTO was designed for troubleshooting communications problems, but Inmarsat engineers discovered that, with careful analysis, it could be hacked to give a rough approximation of the distance between a plane and the satellite. The BTO is basically the measure of the delay in receiving a message from an aircraft as measured by a ground station. In simple terms, it’s analogous to determining how far away a lightning strike is by counting how many seconds until the thunderclap arrives. It’s thanks to that development that we have a chance at finding MH370.
The shift from handshakes every hour to every fifteen minutes isn’t the only thing Inmarsat is doing to help out with future searches. Earlier this year, following the disappearance of MH370, it began offering all its airline customers—some 11,000 passenger aircraft covering nearly 100 percent of the world’s long-haul commercial fleet—free access to its airplane tracking functionality.
It is also launching new “black box-in-the-cloud” services that would allow real-time flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder information to be streamed to the satellite for preservation. That way, it won’t be necessary to find a crashed plane to figure out what brought it down. It’s unclear if airlines will be willing to pay the extra cost for these services. They operate in an industry with minuscule profit margins, and the disappearance of a commercial jetliner is so unusual, it’s hard to use it as an argument for spending more money. It is possible that governments and insurance companies (the main entities responsible for finding a disappeared airliner) may require real-time tracking of jets to avoid a repeat of MH370.
Though it has taken two mid-ocean plane crashes to get us to this point, we have learned from our failures. Hopefully, airline travel will be safer than ever before going forward.
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