UN agency recommends satellite tracking for passenger aircraft

The International Civil Aviation Organisation on Wednesday pledged to work on a global system to track civilian flights.
Dr. Olumuyiwa Aliu, ICAO Council President, the UN agency that governs civil aviation, said this at the end of the two-day meeting in Montreal, Canada.
The conference was coming following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH37 in March.
According to Aliu, it has become a matter of priority to track flights because the system is expected to provide authorities with early notice of abnormal flight behaviour.
Aliu said the disappearance of flight MH 370 and the crash of Air France flight AF 447 in 2009 had reinforced the need for a global system to track airline flights.
“The loss of an aircraft and any loss of life are always of utmost concern to ICAO and to the entire air transport community,” he said.
He said it had become imperative for the industry to lead voluntary programme as the fastest way to get an initial system off the ground.
Aliu said that the unprecedented and unusual circumstances of flight MH 370 had been particularly difficult for civil aviation officials to resolve to this point.
He added that lack of definitive answers had been much harder still for the victims’ families to come to terms with.
ICAO admitted that despite some initial steps to improve safety over the high seas and remote areas, even in the most sophisticated airspaces such as Europe and North America, an aircraft might be subjected to air traffic control only for the beginning and the end of its flight.
He said there had been instances where an airliner had been missing for a prolonged period of time without a positive trace of its whereabouts.
He added: “Most of these incidents were resolved without consequence.
“Recent history has demonstrated that is not always the case.”
Aliu suggested that the airlines might need additional means to track their aircraft, adding that eventually a system would evolve that would be able to gather and transmit tracking data “without any human intervention”.
Xinhua/NAN.