Sat Com System News Today

Either on the ground or in the water. those already exist in some military planes. brian todd, cnn, at reagan national airport. >> thank you very much. i want to bring in now my panel of experts. jeff wise, i dont know if you saw this by clive irving. he wrote a scathing article that says, "why are we so dependent on a system that allows all the crucial data about the whereabouts and condition of an airliner to disappear along with an airplane?" he said, "people are angry, they cant understand...

National airport. >> thank you very much. i want to bring in now my panel of experts. jeff wise, i dont know if you saw this by clive irving. he wrote a scathing article that says, "why are we so dependent on a system that allows all the crucial data about the whereabouts and condition of an airliner to disappear along with an airplane?" he said, "people are angry, they cant understand how that is a fedex package can be tracked to the far corners of the earth, but an airliner apparently cant."...

But the airline industry, as has been said, is under so much financial pressure. it needs -- it needs to be mandated by icao for the whole industry to move forward. >> arthur, one of the arguments against using live streaming data is too many planes transmitting too much information. do you buy that? >> i do not. and theres a very simple solution for it. instead of streaming all the information thats contained in a flight data recorder, you limit the stream to basic information like air speed, l...

Icao has done a lot of testing on satellite transmissions, on the sat-com system, how hay communicate through satellites. theres no reason it shouldnt be implemented at this point. as jeff pointed out real well, if this stuff is turned off, if the fedex box tracking system was turned off, you couldnt track that package. and this is what happened here. it was turned off. so it was either turned off or failed by some catastrophic failure. so we have to realize, we do have this now. >> jim, we just...

Been done. but the airline industry, as has been said, is under so much financial pressure. it needs -- it needs to be mandated by icao for the whole industry to move forward. >> arthur, one of the arguments against using live streaming data is too many planes transmitting too much information. do you buy that? >> i do not. and theres a very simple solution for it. instead of streaming all the information thats contained in a flight data recorder, you limit the stream to basic information like a...

Spot. what does it say about this data that they have gotten about the planes speed and the assumptions that you mentioned? >> well, originally theyre working on very rudimentary data. originally we have an airplane that turned the transponder off that became invisible. were working on military radar data which was incomplete and in some cases we didnt get it from countries it supposedly flew over. or was not made public. and then were working off a ping off the sat com system. we have been work...

Satellite. but not on a regular basis. that means some event occurred. that sat com system is designed to take information or to receive it. if theres an electrical fault or perhaps the engines run out of fuel, go out, that does cause the bus to reset. it shifts over from one power source to the other. during that time would be the ideal time when you would expect that sat kcom reset itself. >> inmarsat said it wasnt done manually. miles, you think this partial handshake is a very, very big deve...

Tangible message, something that can be read by the satellite and then by the receiver. them that takes this wire that takes it all the way back to the satcom system. that satcom system, transmitter, box and antenna is all located in the top of the aircraft towards the rear back of the fuselage. so what i suspect might have happened here -- of course its a shot in the dark as to what happened -- if there were a disruption to the acars box which hasnt been sending signals. its the satcom system t...

Handshake. the satellites had been making them at regular intervals with the flight for hours and hours, but at the very end, there was a partial handshake. what does that indicate to you? >> to me, its the most exciting piece of information weve had in a long time. that last ping, they had been regular intervals. then nine minutes after, it pings again. that tells me that the sat back in the back of the aircraft, top part of the aircraft, its sending out this signal. it talks with the satellite...

Is there not some kind of equivalent of a panic button that a pilot or co pilot can press that alerts the airline that somebody somewhere is a major problem. >> theres nine different panic buttons. >> is it feasible that they werent able to do any of that, shorter than an explosion which has blown this plane to pieces in a second, is it feasible that if it had been an accident of some kind none of them would have had time to alert anyone? >> the only thing i can think thats common to everything ...