Avionics
4 // Operators aboard
Australian navy vessel
Ocean Shield launching an
underwater vehicle to
search for the missing
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM // MARCH 2020 39
Unlike several other companies in this field, Orolia does
not do operational flight tracking but specializes in
emergency beacons.
The company became part of an industry working
group focused on developing ways of solving the issue of
losing aircraft after the Air France crash in 2009. Efforts
to develop a solution were renewed after Malaysia
Airlines Flight MH370 was lost in 2014.
Christian Belleux, aviation product manager at Orolia
says, “The need to be able to locate the aircraft just before
it goes into the sea was identified early on. Once the ELT
sinks it cannot transmit its location.”
The company was part of two European research
projects to develop and commercialize ELTs for aircraft
alongside companies including Airbus and Air France.
The Helios project resulted in the Ultima DT (distress
tracker) which was launched last year and the Ultima S.
The Ultima S activates in the water and was launched in
2018 came after the Tauceti research project finished.
Compared to other solutions, the Ultima range has
more redundancy says Belleux, “Our product monitors
what happens on the aircraft in real time. It is not subject
to downtimes and errors in a communications link.
There is no dish that can become disconnected and the
Ultima is guaranteed to survive a crash,” he says.
“One of our key aims with Ultima was to ensure
someone with unfriendly intentions cannot tamper with
the aircraft’s system. That is why it is an autonomous and
independent system – even if you cut out all of the
circuit breakers it will still transmit,” Belleux says.
The Ultima’s performance has been validated
thoroughly during flight testing: “We have conducted
flight tests to demonstrate the Ultima DT’s capabilities.
It was flown successfully last November by Iberia in
Spain,” says Belleux.
“We used the new Galileo satellites to activate the
device. The test was one of the first applications
returning acknowledgement from the new satellites.”
5 // A Malaysia Airlines
Boeing 777-200ER taking off
at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle
Airport in France, the
aircraft that was lost at sea
in 2014
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