Josh Gates' statement regarding June 2009 Air France Tragedy

As the host of NBC-Universal television's international adventure series, Destination Truth, I log more than 100,000 air miles per year, have visited more than 80 countries around the world, and consider myself an expert traveler. I am therefore dismayed that as we collectively watch this terrible Air France tragedy unfold, nobody is asking this question: Why are we still using antiquated ground-based radar to track modern commercial aircraft? 

That America's air-traffic control system is woefully antiquated is a well established tragedy-in-waiting, but that commercial carriers worldwide are flying aircraft across huge swaths of the Atlantic Ocean with no tracking system at all, is nearly beyond belief. Despite aviation expert Kieran Daly, assertion today that the A330-200 is a "reliable, ultra-modern, state-of-the-art airplane," the fact that all commercial aircraft are not automatically signaling their locations via existing GPS technology is astounding. Why is it that can I use GPS to track my missing $199 iPhone, but airlines won't install the same technology to track a $200 million dollar aircraft and, more importantly, the passengers within? In reading that the plane didn't make contact with controllers in the Azores Islands, Casablanca, or the Canary Islands I can't help but feel as though we're talking about a Lindbergh-era crossing of the Atlantic. We're relying on ground monitors from some of the most remote locations in the world when the technology to track this plane via satellite is not only readily available, but economical. 

As families watch a search grid unfold that stretches from the shores of Brazil to coastal Africa, they should be outraged. Despite indications that the plane may have suffered a catastrophic event at altitude, if passengers did survive, they are currently languishing at sea with almost no hope of rescue. And in the end, what will cost more - the current Brazilian and French military assisted search parties, inevitable submersible recovery of data recorders from the extreme depths of the Atlantic, and the loss of 228 souls, or the installation of simple GPS beacons onboard modern commercial planes? And, in the event that this crash is the result of design flaw in the Airbus A330, or illustrates for us previously unknown operational limits of these planes in inclement weather, every minute that it takes to locate the wreckage and recover and analyze the data, pilots are flying 340 more of these planes around the world, none the wiser. 

Josh Gates
Host/Producer - Destination Truth