Flight plans documents indicate a plane's planned route or flight plan. Now, NASA has come up with a new space-based radio system which can track aircrafts real time, making air travel safer.

No Airplanes Will Be Off The Grid Soon

According to Knowridge, no plane would ever have to be off the grid under this new space-based tracking system. For many years, airplanes have used radar surveillance via land-based radar stations, but this left huge gaps especially over oceans, where air traffic controllers have no real-time information.

In order to compensate, pilots file detailed flight plans, and they are also required to remain within prescribed lanes at different altitudes so that air traffic controllers are able to estimate where they are. This further ensures safety of all passengers while en route.

All these could change now. Deccan Herald reported that NASA has worked with Harris Corporation, a US-based company that will design and develop a new reconfigurable, higher-bandwidth radio. These radios are going to be used to create the first space-based global air traffic control system.

This Would Greatly Improve Public Safety, And Could Save Fuel Costs, Too

A constellation of 66 satellites will go into orbit equipped with the new radios. These radios are programmed to get signals from the new airplane transceivers called ADS-B - transceivers which automatically send out detailed information regarding a flight's number, location, heading and other details. Harris systems engineer Jeff Anderson said that tracking all the aircraft in the world can be done in seconds.

Anderson added that this would greatly improve public safety, and could also potentially save a lot of fuel costs, given that airplanes would no longer have to remain in the particular airline traffic lanes. Also, when something goes wrong, search and rescue teams will have detailed information on where the plane was last spotted.