Monitoring of aviation in remote oceans

Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia will lead a new initiative to improve the monitoring of aircraft over remote oceans, allowing them to be more easily found should they vanish like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Australia’s transport minister Warren Truss announced the tracking trial a week before the anniversary of the disappearance of Flight 370, which vanished last year on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. No trace has been found.

Airservices Australia, a government-owned agency that manages the country’s airspace, will work with its Malaysian and Indonesian counterparts to test the new method which would enable planes to be tracked every 15 minutes, rather than the previous rate of 30 to 40 minutes.