Airlines to have free global tracking, black box in the cloud

This service is being offered to all 11,000 commercial passenger aircraft, which are already equipped with an Inmarsat satellite connection, virtually 100 per cent of the world’s long haul commercial fleet.

In addition to this free global airline tracking service, Inmarsat will also offer both an enhanced position reporting facility to support reduced in-flight aircraft separation, and a ‘black box in the cloud’ service, under which – on the back of certain defined trigger events (such as an unapproved course deviation) – historic and real-time flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder information can be streamed off an aircraft to defined aviation safety recipients.