Originally Posted by
PiggyBack
I do not normally comment at such an early stage because it is speculative and ghoolish but what possible benefit would realtime telemetry bring in this situation? The motivation is clearly morbid curiosity rather than safety because in this as in almost all cases the data recorders will be recovered and any lessons that can be learned will be. However even morbid curiosity woudl almost certainly not be satisfied as in all probability the telemetry broadcast would simply have halted when whatever occured occurred.
The reality is that realtime telemetry would need to be backed up by data recorders to ensure data communications problems did not result in lost data. The safety value is only in those cases where the recorders cannot be recovered which is rare. Rather than safety it is the cost of searching for and recovering data recorders that needs to be balanced against the cost of implementing such a system. If it existed the data should not in any case be released until after an accident investigation.
Real time telemetry does not replace the FDR/CVR but it has advantages:
- much better final position and trajectory than you get from the fringes of radar and ADS-B ground rx
- if there is an issue either with security at an airport or with an aircraft type, earlier data = faster response
- in some cases the flight recorders aren't recovered at all, sp it's nice to have a backup
- an entire FDR image is 138MB. The average web page is 2MB. 70 pax on the IFEC @ 1 single web page = an entire FDR. We need to get our priorities straight on that one and rapidly falling costs mean that it isn't cost prohibitive.
The conventional flight recorders have been very good but they are built on 1950's technology later converted to solid state storage. An increasingly incredulous public cannot understand why we 'lose' aircraft and frankly I can't blame them. Time to get into the 21st Century on this one.