A giant web of high-tech satellites could save hundreds of lives by making it impossible for commercial aircraft to vanish.
The $3 billion network will soon be able to track every commercial flight in real time, anywhere across the planet.
It’s designed to stop a repeat of the tragic disappearance of flight MH370, which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people on board.
The final 10 Iridium Next satellites were launched into space last Friday, taking the network’s total to 75.
US space tech firm Aireon promises the tool will plug a massive hole in the way we look after aircraft.
Flights are currently tracked by radar dishes on the ground, which don’t work over much of the world’s oceans, making it easy to lose a plane if it crashes.
“Seventy percent of the world’s airspace has no surveillance,” Aireon CEO Don Thoma told CBS.
“Aircraft fly over the oceans and report back their positions to air traffic control every 10 to 15 minutes at best and in between those periods, no one knows where they are.”
There are up to 16,000 flights in the air at any one time, and most are tracked by radar and loaded with a GPS transponder.
The transponder is what will link with Iridium satellites, giving a continuous, real-time location rather than 15-minute blips.
“With the Iridium-Aireon system, every airplane is in reach of an air traffic controller … so no matter what happened to that airplane we would know within seconds of where that airplane was,” said Iridium CEO Matt Desch.
Iridium has now fully replaced the outdated 66 satellites (and nine spares) that it launched in the mid-1990s.
The plane-tracking network should be fully operational by 2020.
Between 1948 and 2014, 85 aircraft have vanished without a trace, many with commercial passengers on board.
The most famous of these is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared above the Indian Ocean in March 2014.
Officials stopped searching for the doomed aircraft in September 2017, and all 239 people on board are presumed dead.