The post by the Shadow at #
1782 suggested a mutually supportive P2P solution for flight recorder data transmission, gathering - and collation as required. I ran that proposal past my #2 son who's a very accomplished software programmer and he said "sure thing"! / "easy peasy". He maintains that it's quite a straightforward proposition, even if accomplished via HF USB. Data collection volumes only become a problem if an incident occurs and all aircraft comprising the
"ships that passed that night" need to upload (data-dump) to a centralized facility. That might be accomplished by swapping out hard disks post-flight - so that aircraft never fly subsequent flights with the same HD fitted as on the prior (incident coincident) flight. The regos of those
"ships that passed that night" could be determined and denominated via a data-block on the flight-plan..... and the airline/air force's ops dept asked to upload their aircraft's data.
In addition he suggested that receivers could be placed onboard selected naval and merchant vessels to help fill in the coverage holes in very remote areas.... if it was determined that accessing data from moored and solar-powered marine buoys would be too hard. You could even position one of the new solar -powered high altitude blimps astride the prominent dead-zones.
The challenge of piecing together piecemeal collected and distributed data was solved by P2P almost 15 years ago - and by NASA well before that. The need for expensive uploading to (or bouncing data off) the Iridium satellites constellation need not be a deterrent for inflight data gathering. In fact, if you wished, one of the next Moon missions could station a solar-powered telemetry unit on the lunar surface to intercept much of the transmitted traffic.... and retransmit it on request/as required.
The alternative to repetitive fruitless and futile expensive searches such as that for AF447 answers has generated will probably prove not to be as technologically challenging as everyone is making out.... i.e. cloud computing data collection is a proven capability. But it would appear to be the case now (and I tend to agree) that NOT finding a bottom line for AF447 will be quite unacceptable to all concerned..... yet that is presently the probable outcome. That's the message that seems now to be coming from many different directions. Beyond the
"flight safety unknowns" context, it's quite unfair to all concerned, victims and their families included.
Has anybody found a valid conceptual flaw in the concept?