Enhanced plane tracking to be tested in response to MH370 mystery

Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia will test a new method of tracking aircraft over remote oceans to allow planes to be more easily found should they disappear, as Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did, Australia's transport minister said Sunday.

The announcement came one week ahead of the anniversary of the disappearance of the Boeing 777, which vanished last year without a trace during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board.

Airservices Australia, a government-owned agency that manages the country's airspace, will work with its Malaysian and Indonesian counterparts on the trial of the enhanced method, which would enable planes to be tracked every 15 minutes, rather than the previous 30 to 40 minutes, Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss said.

The tracking rate would increase to five minutes or less if there is a deviation in the plane's movements, he added.

Satellite-based positioning technology already on board 90 percent of long-haul aircraft, which transmits the plane's current position and its next two planned positions, is expected to be used in the trial, said Airservices Australia chairman Angus Houston, who assisted in the search for Flight 370.

That new method will allow air traffic controllers to better track a plane's position, Houston said, while admitting its limitations.

"This is not a silver bullet," he said. "But it is an important step in delivering immediate improvements to the way we currently track aircraft while more comprehensive solutions are developed."

There is currently no requirement for real-time tracking of commercial aircraft. Air safety regulators and airlines have been trying to agree on how extensively planes should be tracked since Flight 370 disappeared from radar on March 8 after veering sharply off course.

Houston warned that the new method being tested may not necessarily have helped air traffic controllers to locate the Malaysian jet's crash site because its transponder and other tracking equipment shut down during the flight.

"I think we've got to be very, very careful because you can turn this system off," he said. "What would have happened while the system is operating, we'd know exactly where the aircraft was. If somebody had turned the system off, we're in the same set of circumstances as we've experienced on the latter part of the flight of MH370."

The Associated Press