Could the Cloud Help Find Flight MH370?
Nations all around the world have joined in on the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. Several outlandish theories have been thrown around in regards to what could have happened. Some fringe theorists have suggested that a portal opened up and the plane flew into another dimension! Original reports suggested that the aircraft must have disintegrated in midair due to the fact that there has been no wreckage found. More plausible theories involve the hijackers being in cahoots with a terrorist organization due to the fact that new evidence shows that emergency equipment was manually powered off, and that we now know that the plane made a sudden turn before going off the radar.
“If we used the cloud, we might know where MH370 is.” says Yijun Yu at Phys.org. Yu goes on to write that if airliners made use of cloud technology, aircrafts simply wouldn’t go missing like it did in the case of MH370. Yu explains that airlines use fairly archaic tracking technology when compared to what the cloud can offer. Aircraft traditionally uses a combination of GPS, radar and ACARS which stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Systems.
Yu argues that aircrafts could use pre-existing satellite networks to beam information back to cloud datacenters which can then be used to store compressed audio of the pilot and co-pilots dialogue with air traffic control. Other analytics can be stored which can help find missing aircraft. The cloud can also setup automatic triggers that immediately alert air traffic control towers all around the world when an aircraft veers off of its course. The intelligence of the cloud has matured enough to where it can be used in place of the archaic air traffic tracking systems available today.
Another theory involving the missing airliner is that malicious code or software could have been injected that turned off the tracking systems thus making the flight vanish. If the aircraft used the cloud, engineers could use encryption and hash checking methodologies in order to determine the integrity of the code that is operating the aircraft. If the code hasn’t been compromised, it will check fine each time. If the code has been compromised, the cloud would know and government agencies around the world would be alerted of that the jetliner is flying with illegitimate code.
It seems as if the cloud is the future of the airline business. As the facts continue to emerge, it becomes clearer that the cloud is the answer to being able to better track aircraft all around the globe.
