Airliners will be required to carry equipment that can autonomously transmit location data and take other steps to prevent incidents such as the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 two years ago, the UN's aviation agency said Monday, according to dpa. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) said the new provisions to prevent the disappearance of commercial airlines will go into effect by 2021. The new guidelines will require airliners to be equipped with a device that can autonomously transmit data of the plane's location at least once every minute if the plane is in a distress situation. Airlines will have to be able to recover data from flight recorders "in a timely manner" and extend the duration of cockpit voice recodings to 25 hours so that all phases of operation are recorded. "Taken together, these new provisions will ensure that in the case of an accident the location of the site will be known immediately to within 6 nautical miles, and that investigators will be able to access the aircraft's flight recorder data promptly and reliably," said Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu, ICAO council president. "They will also contribute to greatly improved and more cost-effective search and rescue operations." The new rules come two years after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared without a trace with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014, an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.
