Originally Posted by flightradar
1. sending live data from a/c to satellite is certainly possible with today's technology, thus eliminating the need for a (name your colour)box. However, the cost is likely to be an issue, upgrading the satcom bandwidth, storing the data, all this will be added on to the cost of flying to the general public. The main problem I can see is that such a system can fail or be turned off.
Cost would not be an issue. With current state of the art compression and quite simple adaptive technology that problem can easily be solved. Amount of bandwidth and storage consumed will depend on various status indicators. It would not be too difficult for software to recognize some basic ones: "normal", "fault", "serious fault", "possibility of imminent disaster". For at least 99% of the time only the very basic flight parameters will be transmitted in the form of single, highly compressed and very short packet. If there is something unusual to report, it would go immediately, and amount of transmitted data will grow. In a highly dangerous situations separate high capacity link would automatically open, and every scrap of available data would be uploaded, together with all available compressed voice recordings. That way both the average cost and additional satellite bandwidth requirement would be quite modest.