ITU Secretary General Hamadoun I. Touré. Photo: ITU

[Via Satellite 10-31-2014] The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has passed a resolution at the Plenipotentiary Conference today to consider global flight tracking in its World Radiocommunication Conference in 2015 (WRC-15) agenda. The resolution also instructs the director of ITU’s Radiocommunication Bureau to submit a specific report that incorporates two years of ITU Radiocommunication Sector studies on the topic to WRC-15.

Discussions regarding global flight tracking have been accelerated after the disappearance of MH 370. In March 2014 Ahmad Shabery Cheek, minister of communications and multimedia of Malaysia called on ITU to speed up international solutions to track commercial aircraft in real time. Several meetings have been held on the topic, and a focus group was created in June 2014 to study what would be needed to create an “aviation cloud” for real-time monitoring of flight data.

“We join the families of the passengers in mourning the loss of lives on MH370 and we must continue to make every effort at the international level to improve flight tracking for civil aviation,” said Hamadoun I. Touré, secretary-general, ITU. “This resolution will be brought to the attention of the World Radiocommunication Conference at its next meeting in 2015 as well as to the International Civil Aviation Organization, with whom we already have a strong framework of cooperation.”