A decade after MH370, will the world finally heed Malaysia's call for real-time tracking of planes?

When Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared in the predawn hours of March 8, 2014, o one at the time had any idea how to go about finding the missing aircraft.

It's a nightmare that hasn't ended for the families of all 277 passengers and 12 crew who were on board the Boeing 777 aircraft; the plane remains missing 10 years on and experts can only continue to guess at where it could be in the largely uncharted depths of the Indian Ocean where it is presumed to have crashed.

Key to the difficulties surrounding tracking MH370's flight path is the fact that the plane's transponder - responsible for sending regular location updates - was manually switched off just over an hour after taking off from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport en route to Beijing.

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In the early days of the search, Malaysian crash investigators proposed that the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) consider making it mandatory for commercial aircraft to be outfitted with real-time tracking systems to make sure there is enough information on hand to locate planes in distress in a timely manner.

"The significance of the MH370 disappearance is that it disappeared - when most people would expect a large civilian airliner to be under constant surveillance, this one has eluded detection for 10 years now," said Keith Tonkin, managing director of Australian-based aviation planning and risk consultancy Aviation Projects.

But a decade on, the aviation industry is still nowhere near full adoption of a system like the one proposed by Malaysia.

In a preliminary report submitted to the ICAO a month after MH370's disappearance, the Malaysian Air Accident Investigation Bureau said it would not be possible to accurately pinpoint the plane's last known location due to the lack of regular updated information on its route.

"While commercial air transport aircraft spend considerable amounts of time operating over remote areas, there is currently no requirement for real-time tracking of these aircraft," the report said.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the time, global aviation industry players and plane manufacturers convened a task force with the ICAO and other regulators to discuss improvements to flight safety measures in the aftermath of MH370.

The discussions eventually led to the development of the Global Aeronautical Distress and Safety System (GADSS), which requires airlines to install an automated reporting system on all new planes that sends out regular updates on their locations.

GADSS was intended to operate on two levels - under normal conditions, the system transmits data on the plane's location at 15-minute intervals.

But when a plane's operations are compromised, an autonomous distress tracking (ADT) was to kick in that sharply reduces the intervals to one minute.

"If we take 15-minute intervals for a plane travelling at 800km/h, that brings it down to a 200km diameter search area. If it's down to one minute, that will narrow the search area by 15 times," said Colin Weir, group chief executive of Flight Safety, an Australian-based aviation safety consultancy.

"That is quite acceptable, because if you get into the general area while all systems are activated to relay an emergency, you'd be able to pick up [the signal] easier and get search-and-rescue vessels out to initiate a search."

Most airlines today have installed systems on their planes that provide enhanced location tracking at 15-minute intervals.

Very few, however, have set up the one-minute ADT system, which is closer to the real-time tracking system that Malaysia proposed back in 2014.

While technology has paved the way for publicly available websites that claim to provide real-time tracking of aircraft globally, experts say search-and-rescue operations need much more precise location data that could only be transmitted from dedicated on-board systems.

The ICAO initially set a January 2021 deadline for airlines to install the ADT system in all new aircraft, but it was pushed back by two years after a survey of industry readiness showed "essentially no possibility" of meeting the original target.

"Assurances were given that this would be resolved by 2023; however the pandemic put everyone back again, leading to the second delay," the ICAO said in a statement to This Week in Asia, referring to the new January 2025 deadline.

Aviation safety experts say the delay could also be due to profit margins for airlines, which were severely battered by strict movement curbs and travel bans imposed globally during the pandemic years.

Airline operators would be hard-pressed to find an immediate advantage in spending on enhanced safety measures, such as ADT, over other commercial considerations including reducing operating costs, according to Ron Bartsch, chairman and founding director of Avlaw Aviation Consulting.

"In such cases, adoption of new processes or procedures or technology is often delayed, and in some cases frustrated," Bartsch said.

With MH370's transponder manually switched off before the plane was diverted, researchers at UK-based satellite company Inmarsat tracked seven pings - spread across one-hour intervals and believed to have come from the plane - to plot a possible route that looked to have ended in an area of the Indian Ocean some 2,000km west of Perth, Australia.

A joint search operation by Australia, China and Malaysia was called off in 2017 after a fruitless effort that covered a 120,000 sq km area of the Indian Ocean and cost A$200 million (US$130 million).

A second attempt by Houston-based Ocean Infinity in 2018 ended with no progress after 90 days.

Weir of Flight Safety said it was "unbelievable" that the commercial airline sector was still dithering on adoption of on-board satellite-tracking systems, warning that "there are going to be more accidents unless you have something in place".

There has been some progress towards full GADSS adoption. Airbus has said new aircraft delivered with a certificate of airworthiness dated on or after January 1, 2024 will comply with the ADT requirement, meeting the mandate set by ICAO in preparation for the 2025 deadline.

ICAO said any plans to expand the scope of GADSS to include older aircraft could be studied "in several years" depending on how well the new tracking system was judged to have performed.

Implementation of ICAO standards and enforcing compliance among airline operators are "a sovereign state's responsibility", as the ICAO is a politically neutral body that sets global technical standards, it said.

But the unprecedented nature of MH370's disappearance could also be working against the push for broader GADSS adoption, Avlaw Aviation's Bartsch said.

"What has happened now is that the world has been put on alert ... to the possibility of this occurring again. And for this reason, we are unlikely to see a recurrence even with the existing technology and processes," he said.

Even if GADSS adoption becomes widespread, it all still boils down to the people implementing the processes and using the technology, according to Tonkin from Aviation Projects.

A 550-page report on MH370 released by Malaysia's transport ministry found that the supervising officer at Kuala Lumpur's air traffic control centre might have been sleeping on the job when they received a predawn call from their counterparts in Ho Chi Minh asking to confirm the plane's location.

Militaries monitoring areas that MH370 was believed to have passed over were also slammed by the public and an international team investigating the case for withholding crucial data that could have helped in the search.

"The recommendations under GADSS are comprehensive and complementary of other technologies that are being developed and implemented," Tonkin said.

"But they rely on individual aviation authorities for their enforcement, and that's the real blind spot in improving the identification and location of aircraft in distress."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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