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Crash Spurs Interest in Real-Time Flight Data
FARNBOROUGH, ENGLAND — In the year since the fatal, still-unexplained crash of a French airliner over the mid-Atlantic, interest has intensified in technologies to enhance the tracking of aircraft over remote areas and enable real-time transmission of the information contained in a plane’s “black box” flight recorders. (www.nytimes.com) Plus d'info...
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The French Navy has some of the most sophisticated, advanced nuclear submarines in the world. The CVR and FDR are equipped with active pingers which work for weeks after an accident. Finding them should have been child's play for these subs. The public will probably never know why, but I think the French did not want them to be found. This just doesn't pass the smell test.
The technology is not new at all. Monitoring of devices remotely, including event recorders, be it an aircraft, or locomotive has been going on for at least a decade now, and getting more sophisticated. I will agree, that while the cost of communications is key, it can be made "smart" by automatically choosing land based, or satellite. There are already examples of this on railroads, where one carrier with over 5000+ units equipped, can monitor real time. They are also very close to having the ability to view video in real time from those same units in addition to data.
Yes, the technology is there, and I find it hard to believe it's cost would be prohibitive.
