MOSCOW, April 05 /ITAR-TASS/. Russia’s new system will be able to keep track of airborne planes and determine their whereabouts if they have problems or disappear, project manager Yuri Fink told ITAR-TASS on Saturday, April 5.
“The system will know the exact location of a plane in any part of the world with radio or radar contact with it or without it. The use of this system will allow us to avoid situations like the one with the Malaysian Boeing-777 which disappeared about a month ago while being airborne and has not been found yet,” Fink said.
He said the system was already making it impossible for terrorists to use a plane as a flying bomb in the way the planes were used in the 9/11 attack in New York.
The system constantly transmits data from a plane to the ground-based centres, which allows them to keep the aircraft under full control. “The system cannot be deactivated and if the crew tries to hack it, it will send a signal to the specialists on the ground and they will know the plane’s exact location at the very same very instant,” Fink said.
In the not-so-distance future, when absolutely secure communication lines become available to prevent unauthorised use, if a plane descends or is directed at city buildings, its captain “can be removed from the plane control cycle and the aircraft will automatically be led to safety”, the expert said.
He believes that the current level of information and communication technologies will “make the project cost efficient”. “The amount of money that has been spent to find the missing Boeing by far exceeds the cost of installing necessary equipment on the planes, let alone the fact that if a plane had to make an emergency landing in the ocean its whereabouts would be known immediately and a rescue group could be sent there. The world will come to that sooner or later,” Fink said.