Comment by lxgr
2 days ago
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...