With Airasia, again FDR's must be searched at the bottom of the seas. (MH307- AF447) - these operations cost millions. The techniques of FDR are 50 years old and outdated. Today all cruise ships use high speed internet at middle of the oceans(for leisure) - hunters use satellite com at the artic or in the jungles.
Millions of Apple clients worldwide, can use Apple cloud backup... but for the safety of airliners, these techniques are too expensive ??
At the year 2015 I do not take such excuses; it cannot be expensive to backup for ex. the last 30 mins of flight data and comms via low orbit satcom satellites, not even for the 12000 airliners simultaneously in our skies each moment. As a pilot and IT engineer I am convinced that other reasons are blocking these solutions... I think most aircraft manufacturers do not like systems capable to increase the proof of technical malfunctions...
(Boeing AHM systems are not relevant here)

 

I'd imagine these features are at the discretion of the airlines (Or so I've read). If they don't want to spend the $$ for it, they are not required to. There could be a number of reasons why they don't want to, but hey maybe it's time for a change.

 

I imagine it is the fact that it hasn't been an issue until very recently. And with anything aviation it takes forever get to developed, approved and then actually purchased and installed. A whole lot goes into that process.

But they still found the boxes of AF447, MH307 is a missing 777 that alone is just mind boggling, and they found this one relatively fast. So it still works, the data is almost always good no matter how bad the crash, so there is a lot to be said for that.

 

The aviation industry, as far as airlines, usually fight these kinds of things tooth and nail (unless there's an accident at the time). Even ADS-B offers vast ability in the US to recreate flight paths and have the data analyzed by the NTSB, and of course data-links on the tracks allow controllers to see airplanes in nearly real time. Huge portions of the world are still stuck doing the "position report" thing, technology is a hard sell when there's no real factor pushing or forcing them to adopt these measures. Maybe ICAO will address this?

 

I agree, the technology is there, it's time the world airline industry jumped into the 21st Century and started using it. I'm in favor of keeping the on-board CVR and FDR, for in depth accident analysis, but at a minimum, the aircraft positions should be sat/data uplinked every few seconds, so in the event of a MH377 type disappearance, they would at least have a pretty good idea of where to start looking.

As with everything else in the industry, it comes down to money.

Nobody wants to spend the money, so until it becomes "Required", world wide, it won't happen.

 

Being knowledgeable of in-flight internet charges, I'd guess something in the order of $5,000-$10,000 per overwater leg, if there is enough bandwidth on INMARSAT to handle it. A deployable FDR recorder on the C-5A, it was so unreliable and expensive that the B model went back to the airline standard system of FDR and ELT. If the U.S. Government can't make it work at an affordable price, I'm not optimistic. That said, a better sstem for locating planes should be doable, but realistically how many are lost. MH370 is unique and likely due to human action.

It's about $6 US per MB, I have no idea the packet size of the FDR/CVR data. But, $10,000 Internet charges aren't unusual.
GF

 

Here's the simple reason: (internet engineer by day). Bandwidth costs money. Over land, you could leverage something like what the folks at GOGO do for streaming the data out, but lets give you some broader context about what resources we are talking about.

The non-upgraded gogo service offering is about 2Mb/s per plane, or 250KiB/s assuming perfect operation. the CVR part (live streaming audio) would consume at least 11KiB/s of that at least. Technology like cellular data is optimized around transmitting data to a client vs receiving. If you divide that 250KiB into 50% upload 50% transmit, you just burned through about 10% of your dataset just getting audio, assuming there are no transmission errors that require you to re-transmit. With the datapoints collected by the FDR, this could easily consume the rest of the available bandwidth (really the spectrum). This is ignoring any labor related questions about having your CVR live-streamed as well.

Over sea, the costs would be much higher as you have to either use HF, or transmit to satellite then down link somewhere and backhaul it to a datacenter. If you assume 2Mb/s * max_planes_aloft, pulling data from Flightaware that's ~6000 just from their limited view. Then you have to store it all, etc.. It's easier to just store on the plane and recover. the cost is much lower.

Bandwidth costs for satellite for 1Mb/s can be 5-7k/month, so * 6000 planes it makes a recovery operation much lower cost as an industry. Even if the costs were lower by 90% that's still ~3Mil/month

 

This. Permanently lost airplanes are essentially unheard of in the modern era (AF was found, and I suspect they'll find MH eventually). Catastrophes in cruise flight are rare, so most crashes happen over or near land in radar coverage.

Data transmission over water requires satellites, which are expensive. In the grand scheme you could use a very small chunk of data (ie hull number, position, time stamp) and it would be fairly cheap, but still add up in the long run.

But if regulators get carried away and start requiring full, streaming CVR/FDR/Engine parameter downloads then the airlines are going to have to get into the satellite launch business$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

 

I completely get why uploading full flight data via satellites is prohibitive.

But several times it seems that the news articles start with "A plane is missing..." and it can be several days or more before they find the wreckage.

Given the commercially available SPOT Beacon, which only costs about $100, and $100 a year to operate, and makes its location available via satellites, almost anywhere in the world, is there a solid reason a product like this is not used, or could not be used?

It wouldn't prevent crashes at all, but it would certainly speed up the process of locating missing planes. (and their black boxes)

 

This is like an ELT...it doesn't transmit continuous updates, only when activated or at a set interval. 30-60 minute intervals are fine for hikers, but that's a vast area at 500 kts. For an airplane it would have to be activated by the crew or the impact...and for overwater flights it would not work underwater anyway.

Also you'd have to certify it for aviation and add an appropriate antenna...multiply cost x1000. And if tens of thousands of airliners are transmitting continuous data, SPOT would need to buy a BUNCH of new satellites$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I doubt they own any satellites right now, probably just rent a little bandwidth from other operators.

The challenge here is not the onboard hardware, it's the cost of the bandwidth.