MINISTER Robeson Benn disclosed Friday that his Ministry had directed that Spot Trackers monitoring the movements of aircraft must take updates of the location of their aircraft every two and a half minutes instead of the ten minutes which have been the general practice.The Spot Tracker is a satellite-based device which transmits the position of an aircraft to a receiver usually operated by a Flight Operations Officer at the headquarters of the aviation company.

He said that this position by his Ministry was taken in the wake of the disappearance of the Air Services Limited (ASL) Islander aircraft which went missing with two persons on board in December last with no trace as yet.`

LESS COMPLICATED
Benn said that reducing the time for updates by Spot Tracker to two and half minutes will result in a search area of about four miles which will make search and rescue or search and recovery far less complicated than the current system of acquiring updates every ten minutes.
Minister Benn noted that the ten-minute updates had resulted in a large area for search since an aircraft can travel a considerable distance in ten minutes after its position had been taken.
MANDATORY
He said that the two and a half minutes update on the position of any domestic aircraft flying in local airspace is now mandatory.
With respect to the search and rescue operations /search and recovery operations ongoing for the past three weeks, he said that aerial search and rescue teams and ground teams have almost exhausted all the possibilities for finding the missing Islander.
The search will however continue for a few more days in the hope that a crash site can be found and that there can be some degree of closure to the mystery of the missing aircraft.
Islander Registration #8R-GHE was transporting cargo from Mahdia to Karisparu, Region 8 (Potaro/Siparuni) when it disappeared around noon on December 28th last.
The ASL plane was being piloted by Nicky Persaud, 27, and also onboard was cargo loader David Bisnauth, 51.
Up to yesterday, the crash site had not been located.