Communications of the ACM
Crash Spurs Interest in Real-Time Flight Data
Air France Flight 447 disappeared on June 1, 2009, en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 228 passengers and crew members on board, but its flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were never found.
European Pressphoto Agency
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.
Until recently, the main obstacle has been not technological but financial—namely, the high cost of transmitting so much data from so many planes, nonstop.
But the failure to locate the wreckage of Air France Flight 447—which disappeared on June 1, 2009, en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 228 passengers and crew members on board—has prompted a number of initiatives involving manufacturers and regulators to devise new systems. Several companies also are actively marketing products to stream black-box and other aircraft data using satellites and the Internet, but selectively, so as to reduce the expensive bandwith required.
From The New York Times
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