Cabby,
Black boxes (FDR's) should be made mandatory on all emergency a/c which per ate over towns. Lets hope it doesn't take a year to do it.
Following a train crash in the US they are now calling for cameras to be fitted facing the driver and another facing the tracks, why not fit a camera facing the pilot like the police and Hems shows on TV.
One camera phone pointing at the pilot/crew, the other mounted on the centre post looking at the panel. Simple to use and a way of sending the information to another contact point.
See next -
This was fitted to the P3 I saw last year and can be fitted to "legacy" aircraft. Retrofitting an FDR is not economic and FDR data is a little rudimentary anyway.
I know by flicking the Shed bus switch the navigation lights and other elec power would be restored but having tried to reach that Shed Bus switch which is behind and above the pilots left shoulder its highly unlikely.
(worst place for a switch i've known - hard to reach)
Yet is not so bad as you would be used to it with every preflight operation of the BTC switches you test prior to take off to check for fuse failure in EMB?
Airbus (makers of the EC135) already have the capability of using satellite uplinks to send real time data from their panes in flight.
(Highlighted when the Airbus A330 went down in South Atlantic) Airbus tracking systems had picked up the decent problems on board in real time. It was sent in micro burst data streams I believe.
Satellite equipment to provide this kind of bandwidth would probably not fit on an EC135.
ACARS has been around for donkeys but probably wouldn't have the low level coverage.
And also -
In the wake of the crash of Air France Flight 447, there has been discussion about making ACARS an "online-black-box."[4] If such a system were in place, it would avoid the loss of data due to: (1) black-box destruction, and (2) inability to locate the black-box following loss of the aircraft. However, due to high bandwidth requirements, the cost would be excessive and there have in fact been very few incidents where the black boxes were not recoverable.