Avionics
inevitable
Devices and software to provide
autonomous distress tracking will
soon become a requirement for
commercial passenger aircraft
n June 2009 Air France Flight 447 from Rio
de Janeiro crashed into the Atlantic Ocean
while en route to Paris, killing all 228
passengers and crew. It took five days to
locate the first bits of wreckage and two years for the
flight data recorders to be located and recovered from the
ocean floor.
Five years later in March 2014, Malaysia Airlines
Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing disappeared
along with its 239 passengers and crew. The Boeing 777
was never found, despite an extensive three-year search
that covered 120,000km2 of the South China Sea,
Andaman Sea and the southern Indian Ocean. What
happened to Flight MH370 has been labelled as one of
aviation’s greatest mysteries.
Both tragic incidents led to severe concerns being
voiced about the functionality and reliability of civil
aviation’s systems for tracking flights, emergency
distress beacons and the flight data recorders
colloquially known as black boxes. Aerospace needed to
provide a robust, joined-up response and that came from
the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), in
the form of the Global Aeronautical Distress Safety
System (GADSS).
© Anton Balazh - stock.adobe.com
AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM // MARCH 2020 37
/stock.adobe.com
/AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM