There are reasons they don’t. This is a deceptively difficult problem
Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor
Coverage (different constellations have different coverage, which means planes would not have transmit guarantees depending on flight path). So you’d have huge gaps anyways
There have been alternative solutions posed, some of which are advancing forward. For example, GPS aware ELTs that only transmit below certain altitudes. But even that has flaws
Anyways I think we’ll see it in the next decade or two, but don’t hold your breath
There's somewhere around 15 thousand relevant planes in the air at any time.
If you sent two updates a minute over Iridium, using their 25 byte message plan, you'd be looking at a megabyte per minute for the entire planet. That's such a tiny fraction of what that single constellation can do.
Most airplanes regularly crossing oceans already do have satcom.
The cost of hardware and additional fuel consumption due to drag aren’t nothing, but the data used itself is essentially a rounding error. (Iridium for example has tiny antennas, and SBD data costs about a dollar per kilobyte, and position data is tiny.)
Of course, that’s all little help when a pilot acts adversarial; on MH370, the breakers for both satcom and transponder were likely pulled, for example.
Yep. Inmarsat has this data for most of the world widebody fleet, and had it for MH370... except when transmission stopped. It's not publicly shared information, because that's what the ADS-B transponder they're all equipped with is for...
Not necessarily. Required certifications, SLAs etc. for safety critical systems are vastly different from those only handling passenger entertainment/connectivity. For example, Iridium has been around for almost 30 years now (launched in 1998), but it only became certified for safety of life applications at sea in 2019, and for aviation around 2010.
Many planes still use completely separate systems for non-critical communication (often Ku or Ka band based geostationary satelliets) and for ATC or operational communication (usually L-band based Inmarsat or Iridium) as a result.
> Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
That’s nonsense. Even when I’m flying right over the north pole my airline will give me unlimited in-flight internet for $20. Maybe antartica has worse reception, but cost isn’t the issue.
Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor
Coverage (different constellations have different coverage, which means planes would not have transmit guarantees depending on flight path). So you’d have huge gaps anyways
There have been alternative solutions posed, some of which are advancing forward. For example, GPS aware ELTs that only transmit below certain altitudes. But even that has flaws
Anyways I think we’ll see it in the next decade or two, but don’t hold your breath