Question for anyone who would know:
Why isn’t all the info recorded in the black box of an aircraft(location, communications, data readouts, etc), immediately uploaded to some online service(Cloud?) in real-time?
I understand the continued necessity of the black box as a signal-beacon should something go wrong and the plane needs to be found, but doesn’t the technology exist to transmit all flight data in real-time?
“Why isn’t all the info recorded in the black box of an aircraft(location, communications, data readouts, etc), immediately uploaded to some online service(Cloud?) in real-time?”
Qualcomm has been working on a real-time data system via satellite that they patented last year.
It’s still a few years off, but it has all kinds of implications for aircraft operations management.
From all the commercial airliners in the air?
That’s a lot of data.
What’s needed is a burst transmission in the event of a parameter going out of normal range, like cabin pressure, or a sudden high G reading, or an engine failure, etc.
That way the data is only transmitted from the plane that is in trouble.
They are working on such.
There are also ejectable recorders, and ejectable crash position indicators, designed to eject from the airplane and thus survive.
It's a lot of data, and virtually all of it, virtually always, indicates normal operation. There is no Internet service up in the air, except via satellite. That is pretty expensive, compared to ground installations, because the antenna is mounted on a moving vehicle, and it has to track the satellite. It's not exactly trivial.
There are radio reporting systems (on Airbus) that use HF, as I understand; that's how the crash of a Brazilian flight was investigated. The amount of data that you can reliably send over a weak HF link in arbitrary propagation conditions is measured in tens of bytes per minute. That's why only abbreviated alarm codes are sent this way, and only when there is an alarm.
I understand the continued necessity of the black box as a signal-beacon should something go wrong and the plane needs to be found, but doesn’t the technology exist to transmit all flight data in real-time?
Emergency Locator Transmittor...beacon
"Black Box"...flight data recorder
Two different pieces of equipment.