Business & GA

Blue Sky Network says its new $1,595 battery-powered portable D410A flight tracking and two-way messaging transceiver opens the door to satellite-based flight tracking for the lighter end of general aviation in remote areas.

"This eliminates the barriers to people putting this equipment on their aircraft," says Carlton van Putten, senior vice-president of sales and marketing for the California-based company. "The installation and supplemental type certificates for fixed-wing aircraft had made adopting this type of technology cost-prohibitive."

Blue Sky's legacy systems, which send data through the Iridium satellite network to the company's SkyRouter web portal, are flying on several thousand aircraft, says van Putten.

Customers pay a monthly service fee as low as $75 for position reports, which include latitude, longitude, date and time and other information through the web portal. Target customers for the D410A are primarily in South America, Mexico and the Middle East, where traditional tracking networks are not available.

A legacy system customer in Peru was able in early October to determine the location of one of its helicopter crews that had gone down in a jungle based on the low-bandwidth data bursts, which can be scheduled as close as 1min or as long as 24h apart.

In this particular case, the 10min updates allowed teams to quickly find the helicopter, although all on board had perished in the crash.