[elmin]

Because the regulatory system which keeps planes safe also makes it paralyzingly slow to keep them up to date. If plane tech is always 20 years behind what is possible, it's not shocking they don't have continuous tracking.

There are also other historical reasons. It's traditionally the job of the pilots in the plane to keep track of its position, meaning giving them GPS was more valuable than giving position information to the ground. The US is just getting to the point where air traffic control can get GPS from planes, and that is based on ground stations which won't work over the ocean.

Which leads to the final issue, the outdated nature of the rocketry industry (and the intrinsic difficulty of getting to space), has made it very expensive to launch the satellites you need for worldwide communication. They exist, but they are much more expensive than any other way of communicating. Which means, if the airlines can piggyback on ground based comms (which they can), there's not much incentive to make that work over the ocean. Until you lose a plane.

[TeMPOraL]

> Because the regulatory system which keeps planes safe also makes it paralyzingly slow to keep them up to date. If plane tech is always 20 years behind what is possible, it's not shocking they don't have continuous tracking.

As it should be. That's why they're safe and reliable. "Move fast and break things" is a good motto for a fighter jet, but not a good motto for building a fighter jet, much less a civilian airplane.

If they're 20 years behind "state of the art", then there's no technical reason not to have real-time live position feed from the plane. The technology itself is old. I'm willing to buy your argument about costs, especially wrt. satellites, but I still like for someone to explain to me why they can't just use GPS + Iridium. It's work, it's relatively cheap, and a small telemetry reading every minute (just position + attitude + airspeed + altitude) would help tremendously in case of anything - from an accident to kidnapping.

[jellicle]

If the internet is to be believed, the Iridium network has a total capacity of 172,000 simultaneous users (if every satellite worldwide is fully utilized).

There are many figures citing 5,000 planes in the air over the United States at any given time. But especially for a tracker, you'd want to leave it on all the time the plane is turned on, so many of the planes on the ground would need to be tracked as well.

My guess is that, particularly for the U.S. and Europe, putting planes on the Iridium network would exceed the total capacity of the system all by themselves, even if there were no other Iridium users.

This is not a trivial problem to solve.

[TeMPOraL]

Thanks for the actual number. It seems though that 172 000 refers to simultaneous voice users. I was thinking about their data services - planes could send short bursts of location data (couple hundred bytes at most) every minute or three.

I agree it's not a trivial problem to solve, but it looks solvable.

[mcculley]

I agree that this seems easily solvable. We use SPOT Trace (http://findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=128) units on offshore tug boats, as do many in the shipping industry. These periodically send their GPS location back via Globalstar. It seems to me that if a passenger jet can be approved to install satellite TV receivers, it could be approved for these.

[twistedpair]

Luckily, with SpaceX hoping to drive down the cost of launches, we'll see more M2M companies like OrbComm pushing down the price of this tracking. That sad, building the constellations, and certifying the avionics, will take time.

[twistedpair]

> why they can't just use GPS + Iridium

They'll need to integrate with avionics networks that are crazy complex. The code on these avionics must be certified formally, line by line, with proofs. Then the electronics and code have to work in an insane range of conditions, while being bombarded with radiation, and never get anything wrong. These take a lot of time and money to develop.

Commercial aviation (i.e. in USA) is safer over the last 14 years than ever in history. You are more likely to win the lottery, and then be hit by lightning, than to die on a trip these days. The reason it's safe, is using 20 year old bullet proof technology, which is working just fine, but design.

Sadly, the leading cause of major crashes is now deranged pilots, and war.