Originally Posted by trainingwheels
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.
Many people were suggesting this after the AF447 accident, but I wonder whether the cost of data storage is really prohibitive in this day and age. We seem to be able to provide free data storage for useless things such as personal Facebook accounts, Instagram accounts, Flikr etc, surely we're able provide affordable data storage for the millions of flights that occur every day through out the world.
The cost is not the data storage, it is the satellite bandwidth required.
I did a very rough calculation on the AF447 thread (here, but didn't not post the numbers:
http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/37643...ml#post4993622).
Back of the envelope, to transmit the FDR and CVR data it would take the equivalent bandwidth of several continuous satcom voice calls (continuous for the flight). The cost of this is roughly comparable to the pilot's salaries for a flight (order of magnitude anyway).
If broadly deployed, there might be quantity discounts. And you could undersample the data _somewhat_. But it would still be expensive.
So then... no price too high for safety, right... but look at it from a different perspective. If you have that amount of extra money to spend on enhancing safety, does live downloading the blackbox data give you the best safety improvement for the money?