Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss today announced that Australian, Indonesian and Malaysian air traffic controllers will jointly trial the tracking of long haul flights at least every 15 minutes and in real time if there’s cause for concern.
“This will mean that there will be much more regular satellite contact with these aircraft,” Truss tells SBS in an interview to be broadcast on Tuesday’s Dateline.
“So in the future if an aircraft is lost, we will know the location immediately and be better able therefore to pinpoint where the aircraft might be.”
Although tracking flights over land is routine, previously tracking in remote areas over water only took place every 30 to 40 minutes.
It was 17 minutes before air traffic controllers realised MH370 had vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and nearly another four hours before a search was launched.
“One of the outcomes of this investigation has been a global acceptance that we need to be able to monitor the aircraft travelling over the vast oceans of the globe more intently,” Truss tells Dateline.
“We have all of the technology available, we will just be using it better in the future.”
The search is now focused in an area 1,800 kilometres off the WA coast, where the plane is believed to have crashed, way off course, in one of the most remote and least explored areas of the world.
The area covered by the improved tracking comprises 11% of the world’s surface, including the current search area, and progress will be reported back to international air traffic authorities and airlines.
Tuesday’s Dateline will have the latest on the misison to find the plane, and also follows the past year through the eyes of Danica Weeks from Perth, whose husband went missing on the flight.
She describes her struggle to explain to their two young children, Jack and Lincoln, what has happened to their father, and talks about her fight to get answers about MH370’s fate.
“How do you lose a plane?” she asks. “They fly past here every day and I just think it’s impossible.”
See the full story of Danica Weeks and the search for MH370 on Tuesday’s Dateline at 9.30pm on SBS ONE, and read more now on Dateline’s website.
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