The Senate moved quickly Wednesday afternoon to close a loophole that could allow military aircraft to fly without broadcasting their locations just like an Army helicopter was doing last January before it collided with an airliner over Washington, D.C., killing 67 people.
Just hours after passing a massive defense bill that included the worrisome provisions about military flights, the Senate approved a bipartisan bill that will require all aircraft use ADS-B technology — or Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast technology — to broadcast their locations.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said that “tragedy could have been avoided” if the Army Black Hawk had been using its ADS-B system to broadcast its location before the crash, and this bill should save lives.
It is not clear exactly when the ROTOR act that Cruz and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell and the rest of the Commerce Committee supports will be taken up by the House and whether changes will be made. But Cruz said that the White House supports the version that passed the Senate Wednesday and promised to help get it approved. Cruz said he is optimistic the bill could head to the president’s desk as soon as next month.
Republican leaders decided not to delay the defense bill by amending it to address the flight safety concerns because doing that would have sent the bill back to the House for another vote.
Can they approve lower grocery prices like the felon rapist promised on day 1?
They’d better hope there’s an off switch for this in military aircraft, or it’s gonna make it easier for enemies to track. The Wikipedia article appears to indicate there is no way for the pilot to interact with the system. There’s also an interesting section about security and spoofing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillance–Broadcast
To the best of my knowledge the ads-b transponders operate with the same interface as previous transponders. That is they can be active, stand by or off. Commercial airliners should never turn them off in the air, but they do have the ability to.
For military aircraft this requirement is almost certainly only going to apply when in “friendly airspace” and at altitudes with commercial traffic. Especially when not on an operational mission.
For truly secretive missions they will likely get blanket clearances in friendly airspace to travel at specific altitudes so they can travel transponder off while avoiding the commercial traffic.
But I’m not an expert by any means.
That’s a tough one. But if they’re going to operate in a way where they don’t want Venezuelan authorities to know they’re there (I got the impression they were making a show of force so…) they do need to inform the atc of friendly countries operating nearby so they can ensure flight plans keep them apart.
But, I don’t know what (if any) procedures they have for this kind of thing. But to me it makes sense, you either close the nearby airspace (kinda makes it obvious something is going on), inform friendly atc so they can keep squawking and non squawking traffic apart. Neither just makes aviation extremely dangerous.
Maybe you can regulate stupid
