Are there any plans to develop a flight recorder device that - instead of " recording" data to a HD/tape, relays data real-time, or batches in near-real time, to a company's maintenance center, or, say, an agency or business that can store this data in the appropriate media and then archive it? Perhaps a passive system that only activates if a certain number of conditions are met, a certain number of faults/conditions that may indicate abnormalities?
It seems kind of weird that someone has not come up with the idea of capturing flight data (or at least part of it), compressing it and relaying it out of harms way via an encrypted protocol, at least for trans-oceanic flights where data retrieval may prove difficult or impossible.
We can steer rovers in Mars, send and retrieve commands to orbiters on other planets, pilot drones in war zones across the planet but we can't downlink text data from a commercial airplane?