In
the post 9/11 era one would have thought, or been lead to believe that every
ounce of the skies covering the earth would be covered by a multitude of high
tech satellites and radar technology. The unfortunate reality as we are
learning with Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 that is not the case. On March
08th 2014, the flight carrying 239 souls vanished from civilian radar
screens less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on
a scheduled flight to Beijing. Most of the passengers were Chinese. Since then
an exhaustive search involving at times over 20 nations and dozens
of aircraft and ships have scoured a region larger then the
entire country of Canada. No definitive piece of evidence has yet to be found
as of March 24, 2014. The question on everyone's mind is, ''how do
you lose a Boeing 777 in 2014''.
The reality came full circle on
Monday March 24th when Malaysian
Prime Minister Najib Razak said, ''Malaysia Airlines Flight
MH370 "ended" in the southern Indian Ocean''. He said,
''searchers used a new form of data analysis — never used before in a search
for a missing plane — to determine the aircraft was lost in a remote area of
the Indian Ocean west of Perth, Australia''. The area where the plane is
believed to have gone down is far from any possible landing sites, Najib
said. "It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must
inform you that according to this new data, flight MH370 ended in the southern
Indian Ocean," he said. This came one day after NASA said it would use high-resolution
cameras aboard satellites and the International Space Station to look for
possible crash sites in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. space agency is also mining
archived images collected by instruments on its Terra and Aqua environmental
satellites, said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel. "Our
satellites and space-based cameras are designed for long-term scientific data
gathering and Earth observation. They're really not meant to look for a missing
aircraft, and obviously NASA isn't a lead agency in this effort. But we're
trying to support the search, if possible," Beutel said.
So how did we lose a Boeing 777 and
what does it say about modern aviation transportation and the security in using
it? Every day throughout the world there are approximately 49,000 commercial
flights. That is Per Day! Expand that to the number of people traveling
per day and that gives you approximately 3 million travellers. Based on the sheer numbers alone one would
think that mankind has a mastery of everything that goes on in the skies above
us. Right? Unfortunately, Wrong. Since we began firing satellites into
space there have been approximately 6,600 satellites launched. Recent counts estimate that
3,600 remain in orbit. But only 1,000 or so are operational; the rest
have become redundant and are now space junk. Approximately 500 operational
satellites are in low earth orbit, 50 are in medium earth orbit (at
20,000 km), the rest are in geostationary orbit (at 36,000 km). So we do have high
tech military satellites that watch over the entire earth 24/7/365 right? Well
yes and no. The primary function of Military satellites fall into the following
categories, Early warning, Nuclear
explosion detection, Photo surveillance, Electronic-reconnaissance and Radar imaging
just to mention the ones we actually know about.So what about all the Movies showing Satellites looking in to
our bedroom windows? Well in reality they are extremely advanced but not as
much as we might like to believe. Satellites called Kennan
"Keyhole-class" (KH) reconnaissance satellites have been
orbiting the Earth for approximately 30 years. They are typically used to take
overhead photos for military missions. The big issue for a lot of people is: "What can
they actually see?"
A KH-12 is a $1 billion satellite that resembles the
Hubble Telescope, except it is looking at our planet. Due to security
restrictions there are no published orbit schedules for the imagery
spacecraft. They are supplemented by the 15-ton Lacrosse-class radar-imaging
satellites.You can think of a KH satellite as a gigantic orbiting digital
camera with an incredibly huge lens on it. Optical image reconnaissance
satellites use a charged couple device (CCD) to gather images that make up
a digital photograph for transmission back to Earth from an altitude of about
200 miles. Since the satellites are in orbit, they cannot hover over a given
area or provide real-time video of a single location. The satellites are
often placed into various secret orbits by NASA space shuttles or Titan 4
rockets and managed by the National Recognizance Office (NRO),
headquartered in Chantilly, Va. Digital images from the satellites are
analyzed, manipulated and combined by powerful computers at the National
Geo-spatial agency (NGA). The black and white images are used by
the military and civilian communities. Many of the details about this class of
satellites remain classified, but it is known that there are several of these
overhead at any given time. They have an imaging resolution of 5-6 inches,
which means they can see something 5 inches or larger on the ground. These
satellites probably can't read your house number, but they can tell whether
there is a bike parked in your driveway.
So what about weather satellites? Weather
satellites take low-resolution pictures of the entire planet each day, but the
high-resolution images needed to search for a plane are less
frequents. There are only around 10 US, Russian and European satellites
capable of such detailed images. They each orbit Earth roughly every hour and a
half, imaging a strip a few hundred kilometers wide as they go. Each
one probably covers a few per cent of the Earth every day. Factoring
in things like maintenance, cloud cover and the fact that they don't take
images all the time, that probably means at most 5 per cent of the planet is imaged
in high-resolution each day, he says. That's not all – some areas, such as
cities, are imaged much more than others. Open ocean is not what you're taking
pictures of, because you're not getting anything interesting normally.
Well
what about the plane itself? All planes have a radar transponder that
squawks their identity and location via terrestrial radio signals. But once
they pass out of range of land-based radar, a few
hundred kilometers from the shore, aircraft are often on their
own until they're picked up by the next receiver. In addition, to aid
maintenance, most airlines use the Aircraft Communications Addressing and
Reporting System (ACARS). Aircraft system reports are sent via VHF radio or
satellite at take-off, during the climb, at some point while cruising and on
landing. Earlier this week New Scientistlearned
that Rolls Royce, which made the engines on the missing Malaysian plane,
reveived two real time ACARS reports before the plane vanished, but Malaysia
Airlines has not revealed whether it has learned anything from ACARS data, or
if it has any.The simple fact is with all of our man made technology we are
still far from being able to see everything all the time. It indicates that
modern day mysteries will still occur. So all of this leaves the families of those on flight
MH 370 where? And equally important where does it leave
the aviation industry going forward. For those of us who would like to
think this is an isolated incident involving tracking over the ocean we better
think again. It took 2 years to locate Air France flight 477 debris field which
plunged into the Atlantic ocean killing 228 souls.The
primary wreckage was found sitting on the bottom of the ocean 2
miles down. Through extensive work and enormous cost the black box was
recovered along with significant amounts of the aircraft. The
lessons learned from flight 477 did not in any way improve or increase the way
civilian aircraft are tracked. Advancement in technology are ''in the works''.
An emerging system called automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is
gaining popularity: this signal includes GPS information about the plane's
location as well as identity and velocity. You can see ADS-B data on amateur
plane-tracking site FlightRadar 24, which told Canadian Broadcasters that
the Malaysian flight "was within our coverage – until it
disappeared".The unfortunate reality is we still have a great deal of work
to do to cover all of our skies.
Somewhere approximately 1300 nautical miles from Perth Australia
there is perhaps a wreckage sitting at the bottom
of the turbulent and dangerous Indian Ocean. For the families
this will most likely become the final resting place of those they
loved. Regardless of the innovations in future tracking technology this will
not help with their pain and anguish. The simple fact is the
entire aviation community owes it to the 3 million passengers they
carry each day to implement new measures as quickly as possible
to ensure that never again is anyone flying blind.
