26 WINGS | March/April 2015 WWW.WINGSMAGAZINE.COMF
irst there was Air France flight
447, and then, Malaysia Air-
lines flight 370. They were
there, and then they were
gone. MH 370 made no dis-
tress call, there were no signs of techni-
cal malfunction or engine failure, and the
weather was just fine. But, somewhere
over the Andaman Sea, something had
gone horribly wrong.
So how does one “lose” an airplane?
The media has struggled with the no-
tion that a passenger-carrying commer-
cial aircraft could go missing without
a trace. Those in the aviation industry
however, were not entirely taken aback.
Air transportation has had a thorn in its
side since the times of Earhart and Lind-
bergh: aircraft beyond line-of-sight over
the ocean are impossible to track in real-
time. What is more, aircraft flying routes
across vast sections of Africa, South
America, and assorted regions of rugged
or inhospitable terrain, are also outside
the range of terrestrial surveillance.
Canada’s north is no stranger to this
issue. Long-haul flights routinely cross
over the Yukon, Northwest Territories
and Nunavut on polar routes between
hubs such as New York and Los Angeles
and destinations in Asia and the Middle
East. For decades, much of the Arctic
was beyond the scrutiny of air traffic
control scopes. Controllers would use
grease pencils and charts to plot routes
between navigational aids. Conservative
non-radar separation standards, based
on pilot position reports and controller-
computed estimates, were applied.
However, air traffic services in the
north began to evolve with the introduc-
tion of ADS-B. Throughout the Arctic
and Hudson Bay, ADS-B technology is
providing information similar to radar
through GPS-based surveillance. This
has led to substantial gains in safety and
efficiency in the northern control areas.By upgrading to ADS-B, air traffic con-
trol agencies are trading up on a technol-
ogy that has not fundamentally changed
since the 1950s. ADS-B provides superior
surveillance capability, with far greater
accuracy than radar ever could. In fact,
the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) has mandated that all commercial
aircraft be ADS-B compliant by June
1, 2020, as part of its air traffic control
modernization strategy.
However, ADS-B, in its current incar-
nation, is limited to regions of the world
where a network of ground antennas can
be installed and maintained. This can
be impossible in some places, and pro-
hibitively costly in others. So, in leavingout the applicable remote, mountainous
and oceanic parts of the globe, air traffic
control is effectively blind to 75 to 80 per
cent of the world’s navigable airspace.
But that’s all about to change. Instead
of looking up at aircraft, ATC is going to
start looking down.A potential solution: Aireon
Don Thoma, CEO of Aireon LLC and a
former U.S. Air Force Captain, was work-
ing in corporate development for Iridium
Communications Inc., a Virginia-based
satellite communications company, as
they were planning for their next-gen-
eration satellite constellation. “We were
looking at ways to leverage what turnsSTAYING UNDER A
WATCHFUL EYE
SPACE-BASED ADS-B IS
LAUNCHING A NEW ERA
OF GLOBAL AIR TRAFFIC
SURVEILLANCE
BY JAMES MARASANAV CANADA is the lead investor in Aireon, along with Iridium, ENAV of Italy, the Irish Aviation Authority
and Naviair of Denmark.PHOTO: NAV CANADA AND AERION