Originally Posted by
eppy
Strongly disagree. Let's put this claim to bed. The only global means for real time data transfer (streaming) is via satellite, and all aircraft satellite antennae are directional (vertically oriented) and placed on a surface that is upward facing during normal flight. An accident aircraft could possibly be gyrating through any axes before impact and thus unable to reliably stream data. The last moments of an accident flight tend to be the most critical to preserve. With current technologies, only a local storage device onboard can reliably store telemetry data when not in stable flight.
But up until that point of total LOC even the standard SatCom antennae would be streaming normally. So in the Indonesian case all bar the final dive and perhaps most of that would be captured. In AF447 the entire drop in stable 'wrong side of the drag curve' stall would have been streamed. In MH340 the entire flight to the South Indian Ocean would have been streamed. For all three of these accidents and almost all others, there would be close to, if not complete recordings of both DFDR and CVR. If I give an Iridium or INMARSAT engineer a requirement for an omnidirectional antenna that would stream in unusual orientations they could design one. We are no longer in the 2400bd SatCom era.