Originally Posted by
Stratopause
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.
The new INMARSAT Global Express service can, allocate emergency bandwidth up to 50Mbs. They quote being able to run real time video for 'tele-medicine' applications. That is less than 30 seconds to upload the entire FDR and it would easily keep pace with the DFDR recordings and possibly the CVR as well. These bursts of emergency DFDR/CVR could be automatically generated given certain values in the recordings themselves.
However, obviously in the case of a fuselage break up for whatever reason or even violent maneuvers the capability to transmit to the INMARSAT or Iridium networks may not be feasible, so there will always be a need for survivable on aircraft DFDR/CVR. However, there must be better in-water or in remote area location systems. MH370 may never be found, even MS804 may not be found, this is not really acceptable just because bean counters didn't want to pay for a larger battery and engineers were not allowed to come up with a pinger that was more powerful, cleverer but perhaps a little heavier. The pinger could also have its last recorded GPS position encoded into the pinger signal.
Because of the MH370 case ICAO has now agreed to track ADS-B - despite ADS-B, ACARS and SSR being (switched?) off in MH370 case. Brilliant.
It is not only the public that is getting increasingly incredulous.