MH370- Five air-safety lessons from MH370’s mysterious disappearance While search teams continue to scour the waters off the coast of Perth, Australia, for a sign of the possible debris from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, there are five lessons to be learnt from the incident and hopefully plug the weaknesses in global air safety practices, said a report in The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). Satellite tracking system Going by technological solutions currently available, flight MH370 should not have disappeared without a trace. Unfortunately, it was not equipped with a satellite tracking system that is used by about 60% of planes, said The SMH report. The tracking system would have broadcast the aircrafts position, velocity and other information, second by second, and allows the aircraft to be located to within 10 metres. The aviation industry needs to embrace the technology as standard and develop a system that can prevent anyone in the cockpit shutting down the tracking system, it said. The report said the airline industry had been slow to adopt the system, especially with many carriers in financial trouble. The backbone of the global commercial aircraft monitoring system is land-based radar, augmented by a secondary radar on the plane that emits a signal pinpointing its location with a particular signature that identifies the aircraft, the report said. However, it cautioned that radar only covers 10% of the planet and there are huge gaps over the oceans and desert, including in Australia. Moreover, the planes secondary radar, like its separate Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), can be shut down in the cockpit, as apparently happened with MH370, or by mechanical failure. The SMH report said this meant that only certain types of land-based radar can pick up the plane, mostly military facilities. Even then, the object cant be precisely identified. It will only be a blip on a screen. Satellites are even worse. The pings from an unidentified aircraft picked up by a satellite over the Indian Ocean last weekend could only be vectored into two vastly divergent arcs to the north and south, The SMH report said. International cooperation There is a need for new protocols in the handling of sensitive material between countries, the SMH report said. As speed is crucial in an air disaster situation, more international cooperation has to be cobbled out. The search for MH370, for instance, has been marred by allegations of countries refusing to share sensitive information from their radars and satellites. Malaysias military was lambasted for not coming forward sooner with information that MH370 had crossed its radar while its allies and neighbours too were slow in sharing satellite information. China, for instance, took three days to release its grainy footage of debris in the South China Sea. It took four days for Australia to reveal images taken by a US satellite of objects believed to be debris in the southern Indian Ocean. Thailand did not share its knowledge it picked up MH370 on its radar for 10 days, saying it was never asked. The SMH report said while it takes time to identify and analyse an image taken from space, China and the US are not inclined to share secrets as air defences and space-based surveillance hardware are some of the most sensitive military information around. Acting Transport Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein said that Malaysia had “put our search effort above our national security”. but bemoaned that they were the only country to do so. Better designed black box? The key to any aircraft investigation is the black box, and it can take years to find if a plane crashed in the ocean, said the SMH report. Ocean currents can pull a plane wreckage hundreds of kilometres from the initial point of impact, and there have been instances where the black box was never found. To compound the problem, its beacon has a short range and sends out ultrasound. It is also not connected to satellites, something experts say should be done, said the SMH report. The disappearance of flight MH370 has prompted renewed discussion about designing a black box that can float, as its signal has a range of as little as 10 nautical miles and runs out in 30 days. The SMH report said a flotation device that is triggered by barometric pressure, once the black box is sinking, should be installed in commercial aircraft. It also highlighted the startling revelation that a black box only records two hours of cockpit conversation and is set on a loop. In this age of smartphones that can store hundreds of hours of music, this seems unbelievable, said the report. Global airworthiness alert system The SMH report said one of the intriguing early developments in the search for MH370 was the discovery by the US Federal Aviation Administration in June 2013 of a 40-centimetre crack on a Boeing 777, where the satellite antenna attached to the fuselage. It took until February this year for a formal directive ordering airlines and manufacturers to investigate and fix any flaws on all these types of planes. MH370 was a Boeing 777-200ER that was captured by the directive (although the antenna, says Boeing, was not installed on this plane). Moreover, FAA warnings are seen as the de facto worldwide safety alert system. But the regulator confirmed to Fairfax Media that it had no formal jurisdiction over the Malaysia Airlines aircraft because it was owned by a non-US air carrier. The airworthiness alert system has been exposed as confusing, incomplete and dangerously slow, the SMH report said. Passport control Two Iranians boarded flight MH370 with stolen passports. Although authorities believed they were asylum seekers and not terrorists, the ease in which they boarded the plane is cause for concern. Interpol has an estimated 40 million lost or stolen passports in its database. Passengers boarded planes 1 billion times last year without their passports being checked against that database. The database already exists but there is no system to cross-check. Surely, a computer program could be devised that did this automatically and quickly, and was rolled out to all airports, said the SMH report. – March 21, 2014.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 09:48:15 +0000
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