Satellite tracking a must for flights

The aviation industry is good at getting passengers quickly from place to place, but does not move so fast when it comes to enacting regulations. The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March prompted calls for all aircraft to be equipped with satellite tracking systems and a UN agency backed the idea. Yet the same questions were again asked this week after AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished and was lost until wreckage and bodies were found two days later. For the sake of safety, allaying relatives' anxieties and improving search-and-rescue standards, the dithering has to stop.

Real-time tracking has long been available, after all. Radar is useful in the busy flight paths of Europe and North America, but has limitations in less-developed parts of the world and is of no benefit over seas and oceans. Spy satellites can see objects the size of a golf ball from space and getting around cities is simple with GPS. Still, even after the outcry over the need for improvements to prevent another tragedy like that of MH370, the measures that were agreed to by the UN's International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) have still not been adopted.

Instantaneous data may not necessarily have saved the lives of the 162 people on board the Airbus flying from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore, but knowing precisely where the plane was would have streamlined search-and-rescue operations. Airline companies are cautious by nature, though; small profit margins have conditioned them to usually make changes only if they are mandatorily required to. An ICAO taskforce that looked into international tracking systems agreed that aircraft should be tracked to within the nearest nautical mile, but there was no agreement on a timetable for deployment, in large part due to the costs involved.

Airline firms are spending millions of dollars to provide passengers with satellite-based broadband services. There is no reason why they should not also invest in satellite tracking. The industry has to make it mandatory: Only this way can all elements of doubt truly be removed from commercial flight.