An aviation industry group is creating a task force to make recommendations this year for continuously tracking commercial airliners because "we cannot let another aircraft simply vanish" like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
As low clouds, rain and choppy seas off western Australia hampered Tuesday's hunt for the missing jet, the head of the operation warned that the 25-day-old search "could drag on for a long time," and Malaysian investigators said they were scrutinizing the last-known conversation between the plane and ground control.
The search has turned up no sign of the Boeing 777, which vanished March 8 with 239 people aboard bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. A multinational team of aircraft and ships are searching the southern Indian Ocean for the plane, which disappeared from radar and veered off-course for reasons that are still unexplained.
The aviation mystery has highlighted the need for improvements in tracking aircraft and security, according to the International Air Transport Association, a trade association for the world's airlines meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
"In a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief that an aircraft could simply disappear," said Tony Tyler, the director general of the group whose 240 member airlines carry 84 percent of all passengers and cargo worldwide.
But the Air Line Pilots Association, the world's biggest pilot union, warned that live-streaming of information from the flight data recorder, as an alternative to the current black boxes, could lead to the release or leak of clues that could make pilots look bad before all the facts about an accident are known.
ALPA said if the goal is to better track airplanes, the answer is a beefed-up, satellite-based navigation system called NextGen.
01/04/14 Eileen Ng and Nick Perry/AP/Fox 5
To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline
As low clouds, rain and choppy seas off western Australia hampered Tuesday's hunt for the missing jet, the head of the operation warned that the 25-day-old search "could drag on for a long time," and Malaysian investigators said they were scrutinizing the last-known conversation between the plane and ground control.
The search has turned up no sign of the Boeing 777, which vanished March 8 with 239 people aboard bound for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. A multinational team of aircraft and ships are searching the southern Indian Ocean for the plane, which disappeared from radar and veered off-course for reasons that are still unexplained.
The aviation mystery has highlighted the need for improvements in tracking aircraft and security, according to the International Air Transport Association, a trade association for the world's airlines meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
"In a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief that an aircraft could simply disappear," said Tony Tyler, the director general of the group whose 240 member airlines carry 84 percent of all passengers and cargo worldwide.
But the Air Line Pilots Association, the world's biggest pilot union, warned that live-streaming of information from the flight data recorder, as an alternative to the current black boxes, could lead to the release or leak of clues that could make pilots look bad before all the facts about an accident are known.
ALPA said if the goal is to better track airplanes, the answer is a beefed-up, satellite-based navigation system called NextGen.
01/04/14 Eileen Ng and Nick Perry/AP/Fox 5
