Tuesday 26 August 2008

Aircraft Black Box's

After the tragedy at Madrid Airport this month I ask why are civil aircraft still carrying in-flight data and cockpit voice recorders - the so called Black Box's (actually they are bright yellow!)

Surely in this technological age we can transmit many channels of data in real-time from the aircraft via satellite or whatever to a remote monitoring station.

As it is we monitor just a few aircraft parameters and record them on little more than audio tape just like our old reel-to-reel tape recorders.

In the event of an accident, the data recorders are searched for, not always easy if the crash is mid ocean.

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