The US Federal Aviation Administration has already installed a ground-based tracking system for ADS-B. “Real-time global aircraft tracking has long been a goal of the aviation community,” Malaysia Airlines chief operating officer Izham Ismail said in the release. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, when it turned around, flew back across Malaysia and then turned toward the remote reaches of the southern Indian Ocean. Whether the Aireon tracking system would have made a difference in Flight 370 is not clear. Inmarsat Plc, which runs a satellite network that competes with Iridium, offers a separate service for airlines that uses traditional communication systems instead of the ADS-B transmissions.

Source: Bangkok Post April 19, 2017 05:15 UTC