Canada takes key role in effort to
shine light on global aircraft surveillance blind spots
The world’s oceans are a massive blind spot when it comes
to aircraft surveillance, a fact that was tragically illustrated by the
disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in March. But a new network of
satellites that will begin launching in 2015 will offer complete global
coverage for the first time — and Canada is a key player.
Today, ground-based radar is generally used to track
aircraft as they fly over land. But once a plane is about 200 miles offshore,
that surveillance drops off and pilots are reliant on less accurate forms of
communication such as high-frequency radio or a text-based system called
datalink.
Monday, tragedy struck again when an Indonesia AirAsia plane, an Airbus A320-200 disappeared
after its pilot failed to get permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather during
a flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore on Sunday. The plane
was refused permission because of heavy air traffic.
The missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people could be at
the bottom of the sea after it was presumed to have crashed off the Indonesian
coast, an official said on Monday, as countries around Asia sent ships and
planes to help in the search.
The drop in radar surveillance offshore is why it’s so
difficult to find a downed plane if it disappears over the ocean, but it also
creates more quotidian problems that raise costs for airlines and extend flying
time for passengers. Onshore, where radar coverage is nearly universal in
Canada except in the Far North, planes can fly within five nautical miles of
each other. But over the ocean, when radar surveillance drops off, that rises
to 80 nautical miles for safety reasons. This means longer flying times, higher
fuel costs and more emissions.
Canada’s civil air navigation service, Nav Canada, hopes
to change that through a joint venture called Aireon LLC that has the potential
to save the global airline industry billions of dollars.
“Probably 80% of the earth is a blind spot to
surveillance right now, which forces aircraft to fly under what’s known as
procedural separation standards which are very, very inefficient,” John
Crichton, president and CEO of Ottawa-based Nav Canada, said in an interview.
“Our plan is to bring real-time surveillance to everyone
on the planet and particularly over the oceans.”
Here’s how it will work: Aireon partner Iridium
Communications Inc., a Virginia-headquartered satellite company, will launch a
constellation of 72 satellites that will carry a technology known as automatic
dependent surveillance-broadcast, or ADS-B. This will broadcast a plane’s location
nearly instantaneously, compared to every 10 or 15 minutes under datalink.
Once launched, Aireon’s service will immediately reduce
the necessary distance between aircraft from 80 nautical miles to 15 over busy
routes like the North Atlantic. This will allow more aircraft to fly at the
optimum altitude to take advantage of prevailing winds and, in turn, burn less
fuel.
Another side benefit to passengers could be less
turbulence. Currently, airlines flying across the North Atlantic are stuck in a
set track — “almost like a conga line of airplanes across the ocean,” according
to Aireon CEO Don Thoma, a former Iridium executive. This leaves pilots with
few options if they encounter turbulence on the route, but the new Aireon
system will give them more flexibility to fly above or below bumpy spots.
Mr. Thoma estimates that Aireon will save airlines an
average of $400 in fuel costs per flight during the three-and-a-half hour trip
across the North Atlantic.
“It’s been estimated that when the service is in
operation in 2018, it will save on the order of $125 million per year on fuel
just for the airlines flying across the North Atlantic,” he said.
This won’t necessarily mean the planes are travelling
faster, but it will mean they’re travelling more efficiently. However, Mr.
Thoma said he hopes that Aireon will eventually allow airlines to take more
direct routes from, say, Madrid to Miami, saving passengers time in the
process. Aireon should also help decongest the busiest routes, like London to
New York, and allow for more flights at optimal times of day.
It will save on the order of $125 million
per year on fuel just for the airlines flying across the North Atlantic
And it won’t just improve aircraft surveillance over the
ocean. There are also wide swathes of Africa and Asia, as well as some parts of
South America, that aren’t covered by radar.
“It’s a quantum leap for the parts of the world that have
not deployed Stuart Gradon/Postmedia News files
Airlines are enthusiastic about the new technology,
according to the industry’s global trade body.
“IATA does not endorse individual vendors, but we
certainly see value in space-based ADS-B and its potential to improve both
safety and security,” said Tony Concil, spokesman for the International Air Transport
Association. “It is clearly an area of great interest in the industry.”
And interest has only heightened since the disappearance
of MH370. One of the side benefits offered by Aireon is the ability to pinpoint
the exact location of a crash — assuming, of course, that the plane’s
transponder is switched on, which it was not in the case of MH370.
Aireon has agreed to make its service available free of
charge to search-and-rescue authorities through a system called ALERT.
Although it wouldn’t have helped to find MH370 since the
plane’s transponder was shut off, Mr. Crichton cited the example of Air France
Flight 447, which crashed en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009.
“It took them two years to find the airplane and God
knows how much money,” Mr. Crichton said.
“We could have pinpointed where the airplane went down
within a matter of seconds.”
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