
Nav Canada leads global effort to prevent lost airliners - wglb
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/nav-canada-leads-global-effort-to-prevent-lost-airliners
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fruzz
I worked in the airborne geophysics business before this. Their dismal air
safety record meant that there was much value in improving standards.

As part of this, they had a system that tracked the aircraft globally in real-
time. I implemented part of the software for this. Aircrafts sent their GPS
coordinates and basic telemetry every 45 seconds over Iridium. I got it in my
servers a minute later.

If the aircraft position stopped being reported for ten minutes, or the system
detected anomalous flying conditions (eg. Suspected crash), or the pilots
pressed a big red button, the system contacted a hierarchy of people by phone.
They'd then call the pilots directly within minutes, over the Iridium network.

This cost us very little to operate. I was very surprised that large airliners
did not have such a system in place.

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wglb
I am wondering if one of the considerations is the sheer volume of air traffic
these days. The bandwidth requirements seem to be rather large.

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fruzz
I don't know. It wasn't much consumption though. For our traffic, we were
looking at a hundred bytes per minute, per aircraft, during normal operations.
Enough to send coordinates, speed, direction, power state, engine state, etc.

During unusual activity, the amount of telemetry increased (to narrow down the
area for a search and rescue efforts) but it still was in the hundreds of
bytes per minute.

