Outside the US, steps taken to track planes better

Paris: Some foreign regulators and airlines have moved much faster than their U.S. counterparts to adopt more advanced airplane tracking technology.

After a nearly two-year search for the wreckage and black box flight recorders attached to an Air France jet that sank off the coast of Brazil in 2009, investigators at the Bureau of Investigations and Analysis in France published a 219-page report that included a series of recommendations aimed at helping to speed the search and recovery of aircraft that crash in the ocean.

Those recommendations, which were endorsed at the end of last year by the European Aviation Safety Agency - the European Union's equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration - include some of the proposals put forth separately by the FAA, including tripling the battery life of a jet's underwater locator beacon to 90 days from the current minimum of 30 days.

But the European recommendations have gone even further than that. Although not expected to become mandatory for all European Union airlines until 2019, the proposed changes include requiring a mechanism that would jettison the flight recorders from the fuselage upon an impact with water. The recorders would also be equipped with flotation devices so they would remain at the surface to broadcast their location.

The proposed changes also include a requirement that planes carry systems that can transmit their location and other basic flight data at regular intervals via satellite - and that would switch automatically to real-time transmissions if onboard computers detect the plane is about to crash.

Meanwhile, plans to replace radar-based air traffic control with satellite-based technology in the United States, Europe and Australia would eventually go a long way toward improved tracking of flights. Although the United States is not expected to require airlines to install the necessary satellite transmitters until 2020, introduction of the technology has been underway in Europe since 2004. In Australia, it became mandatory in December for all planes flying above 29,000 feet.

And some airlines are not waiting for a regulatory mandate.

Air France, spurred by the loss in 2009 of its plane, which went down with 228 people aboard, has replaced the batteries powering the underwater beacons of its entire fleet of 350 planes. They now last a minimum of 90 days.

It has also programmed all of its planes to automatically transmit three pieces of data - position, altitude and remaining fuel - every 10 minutes, instead of the 20 to 30 minutes for most airlines. The frequency of these reports increases to once a minute in an emergency, as if a plane descends at an unusually high rate.

Captain Eric Prévot, an Air France pilot, conceded that the more frequent reporting meant an expense for the airline, though he declined to provide figures.

"There is a cost," Prévot said. "But safety has no price. At the end of the day, this is a choice by the airline."

(Jad Mouawad and Christopher Drew contributed reporting from New York.)