(credit: Wikipedia)
The UN's international civil aviation organisation (ICAO) has announced new provisions to help prevent future aircraft disappearances. The new provisions were unveiled yesterday, March 8, on the second anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 (MH370).
The amendments to the Chicago Convention, which lays down a bunch of aircraft, airspace, and airport rules for almost every member of the United Nations, are all within Annex 6 (the section that deals with the "operation of aircraft"). The three most significant tweaks are:
- Aircraft must carry "autonomous distress tracking devices" that can "transmit location information at least once every minute in distress circumstances."
- The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) must be able to store at least 25 hours of recording, "so that they cover all phases of flight for all types of operations."
- Aircraft must be "equipped with a means to have flight recorder data recovered and made available in a timely manner."
Currently, due to a variety of different solutions used by airline operators and the limited reach of ground-based radar, aircraft can't be reliably tracked in real time—plus, when they do disappear, we can't reliably find the flight data recorder (FDR) or CVR. Civil airline operators will have five years (until 2021) to adopt these measures.
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