EU Adopts Tougher Rules On Tracking Airliners

December 16, 2015

The European Union has adopted new rules to make it easier to track airliners, stepping up international efforts to prevent a repeat of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 with 239 people on board.

The move is the first change in core legislation by a major regulator since last year's unresolved disappearance of MH370 and is expected to provide impetus to efforts by the United Nations' aviation agency ICAO to set new global standards.

It also incorporates recommendations from French investigators into the crash of an Air France jet in the Atlantic in 2009. The wreckage of that aircraft took two years to locate.

Under the new rules, airlines will be given three years to install a means of tracking aircraft when flying in normal conditions outside radar coverage, over oceans or remote land.

They must also have a system for more frequent updates in the event of an emergency: one that is robust enough to prevent a technical malfunction or someone switching it off, as some investigators suspect happened on the missing Malaysian jet.

"That would make the re-occurrence of scenarios such as (Air France) AF447 or (Malaysia Airlines) MH370 technically impossible," a European Commission spokesman said.

A global industry task force originally proposed that existing tracking technology should be introduced by 2016, but airlines had lobbied international regulators for a delay, citing the need to ensure systems worked automatically.

The new EU legislation stops short of specifying the interval between updates, an issue with cost implications that has also divided some regulators and airlines. That will be for Europe's Aviation Safety Agency to decide after consultations.

But it fits with plans by the ICAO to impose a 15 minute standard for normal flight tracking by November 2018, while leaving the door open to tighter rules supported by some European officials in future.

European regulators have said they would ideally like an airliner to report its position every three minutes, noting that the four minute gap in signals from the Air France jet in 2009 left an Atlantic search area of 17,000 square km.

Flight data recorders will also be improved.

The maximum length of cockpit voice recordings will be increased to 25 hours from the current two hours, a long-term measure designed to cover the most extreme situations, such as the lengthy uncharted disappearance of MH370.

Recorders must either be 'deployable,' or ejected from an aircraft in distress to prevent them being lost, or easier to find by tripling the pinger battery life to 90 days and lowering the frequency to one easier for military vessels to spot.

One of the key lessons of the 2009 disaster was that using the right frequency is crucial to ensuring the data recorder signals carry over longer distances and can be picked up by military or coastguard, who are usually first to reach a remote crash site.