Inmarsat to provide free tracking service after MH370 mystery

Inmarsat, the British firm whose satellites helped track the final path of the crashed Malaysian jet, today said it would offer a free, basic tracking service to the world's 11,000 passenger aircraft to try to prevent a repeat of a MH370-type mystery.
Inmarsat said it has proposed to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) a free global airline tracking service over the company's satellite network, as part of the anticipated adoption of further aviation safety service measures by the world's airlines following the loss of flight MH370.
"This service is being offered to all 11,000 commercial passenger aircraft, which are already equipped with an Inmarsat satellite connection, virtually 100 per cent of the world's long haul commercial fleet," the London-based leading provider of global mobile satellite communications safety services said in a statement.

The offer follows the case of Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines plane, carrying 239 people, including five Indians, had mysteriously vanished on March 8 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur.
It was very brief electronic "pings" from Inmarsat equipment on the lost Boeing 777-200 plane that prompted investigators to look for wreckage in the remote Indian Ocean.
Inmarsat says the free service it is offering would carry definitive positional information.

It would see a plane determine its location using Global Positioning System (GPS) and then transmit that data - together with a heading, speed and altitude - over Inmarsat's global network of satellites every 15 minutes.

"Our equipment is on 90 per cent of the world's wide- body jets already. This is an immediate fix for the industry at no cost to the industry," Inmarsat senior vice-president Chris McLaughlin said.
Cost is one of the reasons often cited for the reluctance of airlines to routinely use satellite tracking.
The satellite operator would carry the cost, anticipated to be about USD three million a year, the BBC said.
The company would hope to recoup costs as airlines moved to take up some of its premium services. "But we would keep that basic tracking service free of charge," it quoted McLaughlin as saying.

Both ICAO and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) are currently considering how best to respond to the loss of MH370.
Malaysia believes the flight was deliberately diverted by someone on board and that satellite data indicates it crashed in the Indian Ocean. A multinational search has so far not succeeded in tracking the aircraft or its black boxes despite deploying hi-tech gadgets.
Investigators, including the FBI, are looking into a range of aspects, including hijack, sabotage and psychological problems, that may have caused the incident.