MH370 Since the MH370 crisis has highlighted deficiencies in how flights are tracked and air crashes are investigated, the science magazine New Scientist has published a list of measures that are being implemented or considered by the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) that could prevent a repeat.

These five measures are: For aircraft to report its location via satellite every 15 minutes; for an aircraft to automatically transmit black box data via satellite when it detects an impending crash; to increase the recording time of the cockpit voice recorder; to give black box ‘pingers' a longer battery life, and add a second pinger that can be heard further away.

Currently, searchers are racing to locate MH370's black box before its pinger's 30-day battery expires around April 7, after which the search would become more difficult.

The missing aircraft disappeared from civilian radar at 1.30am on March 8, before flying out of military radar range at 2.40am.

The only clue that it flew for hours towards the Indian Ocean came from an analysis of six hourly ‘handshakes' with an Inmarsat communications satellite that the aircraft made after contact was lost.

Even if the black box is found, investigators may never know what happened to the pilots of MH370 at the crucial moment when it began to veer off course, because its cockpit voice recorder is meant to only record its last two hours.

The New Scientist article on Thursday said that European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has just finished consulting industry experts on the idea of a 15-hour cockpit voice recorder on March 20, and is likely to consider MH370 case in making its final decision.

In addition, aviation regulators like the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and EASA are increasing the battery life of the black box pinger to 90 days.

However, EASA has yet to decide when to enforce this while FAA will only start implementing this in 2015 to be completed by 2020.

Black box data via satellite

The pingers are underwater locator beacons attached to the black box to help searchers find it. It emits an ultrasonic pulse at a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz once per second upon immersion in water.

However, this sound can only be detected from up to 1.5 kilometres away, so EASA had proposed that a second pinger is added to the airframe, following the lessons of the Air France Flight 447 crash in 2009.

This pinger makes noise at a frequency of 8.8 kilohertz, which can be heard up to 10.7 kilometres away.

"This would assist in locating the wreckage on the sea floor when the latter is very deep and the search area is very large," EASA safety information officer Dominique Fouda is quoted as saying.

Also following lessons from the Air France Flight 477 where it took two years to recover the aircraft's black box, the French investigators have proposed that aircraft automatically detect an impending crash and begin transmitting black box data via satellite.

"The (detection) algorithm we developed managed a perfect response… We triggered on all the accidents with no false positives when it was run against both the accident database and data on normal flights," said Cranfield University air safety and accident investigation unit head Matthew Greaves, who had worked with French authorities on the ‘triggered transmission' idea.

The article adds that a major hindrance to simply transmit all flight data to a server on the ground is the cost of transmitting the vast amount of data via satellite , and says triggered transmission is ‘a much better idea'.

It can also help search and rescue teams narrow the ill-fated aircraft's last known position down to six nautical miles (about 11 kilometres).

As for tracking aircraft even when flying in remote oceans, it was proposed that location data is added to the aircraft's ‘handshakes' with communications satellites – the same ones that helped determine that MH370 had flown towards the Indian Ocean.

The article quoted an Inmarsat official that it costs USD1 (RM3.27) per hour to transmit location data every 15 minutes, while the satellite communications company Iridium is launching 66 new satellites that can provide a constant aircraft tracking service from 2017 onwards.

However, Greaves said until recently, there has been no call for complete location data.

"Current primary and secondary radar give us the full air traffic control we need to stop aircraft colliding.

"What we haven't had until now is knowledge of where all aircraft are at all times. We haven't had that motivation before," New Scientist quotes him saying.