Airlines not worried about cost of real-time aircraft tracking: U.N. official

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Major airlines are united on the need for real-time tracking of commercial aircraft following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and have not raised cost as a concern, a senior official with the United Nations' aviation agency said on Monday.

Member countries of the International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) governing council agreed earlier this month on the need for global tracking, although they did not commit to a binding solution or timeline.

Instead, the global airline industry group, International Air Transport Association (IATA), agreed to come up with proposals for better tracking by the end of September. IATA said its members would implement measures voluntarily, before any rules were in place.

"In principle the community has agreed. There's no question this is something we need to do," Nancy Graham, director of ICAO's Air Navigation Bureau, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.

"We are developing the voluntary path and a rule for the future. We intend to have regulation to support that globally."

Asked whether the cost of implementing new standards was a stumbling block for airlines, Graham said: "Not at all, they're absolutely in solidarity. There's no price you can put on safety or certainty on where the aircraft are."

Graham was speaking at the start of a two-day experts' conference sponsored by Malaysia's government on real-time monitoring of flight data.

Malaysia has joined calls for reforms to the way commercial jetliners are tracked after MH370, a Boeing 777 jet, vanished from civilian radar screens less than an hour after take-off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8.

Malaysian investigators suspect someone shut off MH370's data links making the plane impossible to track, prompting the country's Prime Minister Najib Razak to call for ICAO to adopt real-time tracking of civilian aircraft.

MH370 is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia. But no trace has been found since it went missing with 239 people on board, despite the most intensive search in commercial aviation history.

Questions have been raised over how fast regulators can act on tracking due to possible resistance to some measures from manufacturers and airlines.

A European proposal to increase the maximum amount of recording time on cockpit voice recorders to 20 hours from two hours ran into opposition from Airbus and pilot groups.

Some pilots expressed concerns about longer recordings, saying they could be misused by employers, released without their authorization or used in court without their permission.

If found, the voice recorders on MH370 will contain recordings of only the last two hours of the flight, which would be several hours after the plane disappeared from radar off Malaysia's east coast.

Graham denied there had been a lack of urgency in implementing flight-tracking reforms following the 2009 crash of an Air France jetliner in the Atlantic Ocean, and said tracking would not have prevented the MH370 disaster.

"Global tracking would not have prevented this incident," she said. "We don't know right now what caused this accident."

(Writing by Stuart Grudgings; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

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