Central System Tracks Aircraft in Distress

There’s now a central data bank that tracks all aircraft in distress anywhere in the world as long as they have the right gear on board. The Autonomous Distress Tracking from aircraft now gets fed into the Location of an Aircraft in Distress Repository (LADR). “We have achieved a significant step forward in strengthening the international community’s ability to track aircraft in distress and respond swiftly and effectively to emergency situations worldwide,” said ICAO Secretary General Juan Carlos Salazar. The global platform feeds information directly to search and rescue organizations and other groups that respond to aircraft emergencies.

ADT was created in response to the mysterious loss of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared from almost all tracking systems available at the time 2014. There are now ADS-B trackers that keep tabs on anything with ADS-B Out, but ADT differs in that it detects unusual attitudes or system failures and triggers a once-a-minute signal that marks it as an aircraft in distress. The box is not connected to the flight deck so it cannot be shut off by the pilots, a key point of contention in the Malaysian disappearance. The system was developed by EUROCONTROL for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and is a core component of the ICAO’s Global Aeronautical Distress and Safety System (GADSS) aimed at “ensuring that aircraft in distress can be located quickly and accurately, enabling faster rescue operations and saving lives,” ICAO said in a release.