The State of Airline Flight Tracking 6 Months After the Vanishing of MH370
Skift Take
There has been sufficient interest to motivate providers to develop a variety of viable solutions and that alone is progress. We'll know how much longer we have to wait before aircraft tracking becomes a standard, after the ATTF publishes its report by the end of this year.
Six months after the disappearance of MH370, all we know about what happened to the aircraft is what we don't know.
We don't know how or why communications to the aircraft were cut off. We aren't certain what direction the aircraft took after it lost communications. We don't undestand how we could lose an aircraft in 2014. We're unsure how to keep that from happening again.
In that time, the business of developing an aircraft tracking system has grown. The infrastructure for a number of solutions is being put in place.
Driving this growth is the decision by the industry push, led by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which represents 240 of the world's airlines, to set up a dedicated Aircraft Tracking Task Force (ATTF) which will identify the best aircraft tracking options for airlines, in collaboration with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The objective of the ATTF is to identify solutions which are viable and affordable to airlines,
