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.
“From all the commercial airliners in the air?”
Yep...
Operations will have real-time parameters on every flight, and anything non-normal will immediately trigger an alarm for the dispatcher.
The real problem is satellite access, it will probably require dedicated birds.
This has real implications for large airlines, with the potential to save billions of dollars a year in costs (fuel, engine wear, etc.).
The pilots won’t like the company “looking over their shoulder” though, just like cockpit cameras. Count on it.
It’s a lot of data, but isn’t particularly storage intensive. Assuming all the readout data is kept digitally you’re talking about a very small amount of storage space required. The most storage space would come from any recorded audio. And I’m sure they could have a system to prioritize any audio that should be recorded/shared.
Your burst transmission system seems like a good idea too, but only if you had a reliably dedicated uplink at all times.
Either way, just wondered why the tech isn’t universal yet. I figure if all the passengers can watch youtube movies in the back of the plane, it should be a relatively simple task to send the plane’s inflight data out.