While flying over Austria earlier this month, a total of 13 long-haul flight passenger airplanes caused much confusion and panic as they literally vanished from radars; not just once, but twice! On 5th June and on 12th June, air traffic controllers were forced to monitor the aircrafts’ progress with just their voice, no visual, for 25 minutes. It was also reported that Austria’s neighbour countries suffered blackouts.
With the Malaysian Airlines flight, MH370, is still missing with all passengers and crew, you can imagine the frenzy of activity that went on during this period and with as many as 4,000 planes flying over Austria on a daily basis, the situation could have resulted in dire consequences. Whilst the countries that also suffered an outage weren’t named by Austro Control, German air traffic control confirmed they had blackouts, as well as the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
So, how are planes monitored in air space by air traffic controllers? Two radar systems are used; the primary system, which is the main one that detects and measures the position of the aircraft via radio signals; and the secondary radar which looks after altitude and identity but uses transponder targets that automatically transmit codes to the transponders in commercial aircraft. Aircraft that are over 150 miles out to sea use a high-frequency radio to stay in contact with air traffic controllers; and the famous ‘Black Box’ includes a flight data recorder and a voice recorder. It sends ultrasonic waves – no GPS, as some might think – but they do have a limited range, which has been part of the problem in trying to locate Flight MH370.
The recent revelations by Austria’s aviation authority has similar connotations to the recent disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight, which was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it mysteriously went missing on 8th March, and these two incidents will certainly raise a few eyebrows, if not spark a full scale investigation.