New tougher jetliner tracking rules adopted by EU

As a consequence of the still unaccounted for disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 with 239 people on board on the 8th March last year, plus taking into account recommendations made by the French investigators subsequent to the crash of Air France’s Flight 447 in the Atlantic killing all 228 passengers and crew on board, the EU has announced the implementation of new rules which will make it easier for jetliners to be tracked and located.
The rules have given airlines three years in which to modify their commercial aircraft to incorporate tracking means which will remain effective even when flying outside radar coverage when over large expanses of remote terrain or over oceans. Any installed tracking devices must be sufficiently robust to cope with any severe conditions, provide more frequent updates in times of an emergency, to be able to withstand any technical malfunctions within the plane, and for crew members to be unable to deactivate it, as is suspected with Flight MH370. A European Commission spokesman made it clear: “That would make the re-occurrence of scenarios such as AF447 or MH370 technically impossible.” It took over two years to locate the wreckage of Flight AF447.
Where core legislation is concerned, this is the first major change relative to the disappearance of the Malaysia flight, and it is hoped that such action will spur the UN International agency, the Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), to adopt a similar policy with international airlines. Originally a global task force had pushed for such a system to be adopted by 2016, but airlines successfully objected as they wanted time for a fully automatic system to be developed.
However, what has yet to be decided is the interval between location updates, a factor which is already dividing a number of regulators and airlines, particularly in relation to the costs involved. The ICAO are certainly leaning heavily towards 15 minute intervals to be imposed for standard flight tracking by 2018, but they have created an opportunity for the EU to impose even tighter regulations. The EU have hinted at location reports every 3 minutes, based predominantly on the fact that despite the Air France flight crashing just four minutes after its last tracked position, it still left a search area of some 17,000 square kilometers of ocean.
The new legislation will also see black box recorders upgraded, allowing for 25 hours of data recording as opposed to the current two, in order to ensure that details of any lengthy incident will still be recorded. In addition, these upgraded recorders must either be ‘deployable,’ or ejected from an aircraft in distress to avoid their loss, while tripling the life of the pinger and reducing its frequency to enable military search and rescue to more easily identify it, which was again a contributing factor to the delay in locating Air France Flight 447.