Once again, the world is mesmerized by the search for the cause of a major commercial air catatrophe. As is always the case, the first order of business is the search for the so called "black box."

What is amazing is that nearly a half a century after landing on the moon; decades of launching thousands of telecommunications satellites tracked by advanced radio telemetry; decades of nautical practice utilizing satellite tracked emergency position indicating radio beacons (EPIRB), not to mention quantum advances in digital data communications technologies, we still rely on bright orange "crashproof" boxes filled with magnetic tape and a 30 day transponder to track commercial jet catastrophes.

The aeronautics industry undoubtedly has a litany of cost-benefit justifications for this Flintstonian approach. But it is amazing nevertheless. How many hundreds of thousands of passengers fly commercial aircraft every year. If you really want to be in a position to assure the public that the odds of a weather induced catastrophe are less than NIL, it would seem that an upgrade of flight telemetry and tracking systems is in order.

No expense will be spared in the search for the Air France black boxes in the deepest trenches of the Southern Atlantic (http://www.latimes.com/news/n­ationworld/world/la-fg-crash-s­earch3-2009jun03,0,3276994.sto­ry) and justifiably so. I would wager that the boxes will eventually be found. If you are wondering how, read about the Hughes Glomar Explorer which was built to hijack a lost Russian submarine in 1974. I am sure that France, the motherland of Jacques Cousteau will be there to meet the challenge.

But perhaps, just perhaps, it is time to take a careful look at the "black box" technology currently employed by the commercial airline industry. Has the "block box" advanced on the trajectory implied by Moore's Law?

You may say, "Hey Banzai7, what do you know about this? Its too complicated. Leave it to the experts." I say, "You know what, I have a device in my pocket that pinpoints my coordinates 24/7, it provides me with a constant two way data stream and will instantaneously deliver my GPS coordinates on a satellite map. Maybe Google should redesign the black boxes."

Note: WIKIpedia: On 19 July 2005, the Safe Aviation and Flight Enhancement Act of 2005 was introduced and referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure of the U.S. House of Representatives. This bill would require installation of a second cockpit voice recorder, digital flight data recorder system and emergency locator transmitter that utilizes combination deployable recorder technology in each commercial passenger aircraft, currently required to carry each of those recorders. The deployable recorder system would be ejected from the rear of the aircraft at the moment of an accident. The bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Aviation and has not progressed since.

we still rely on bright orange "crashproof" boxes filled with magnetic tape and a 30 day transponder to track commercial jet catastrophes.

It has been quite a while since flight recorders using magnetic tape were used in new aircraft.

Both the data and voice recorders switched to flash memory chips quite a while ago.

As to "Moore's Law" progress, the voice recorder has not moved much, upgrading from 4 channels on a 30 minute loop many years ago to 4 channels on a two hour loop more recently, but not many people could be found to advocate that 8192 sound channels on a 16384 hour loop would help many crash investigations.

However, on the Flight Data Recorder side, there has a huge upgrade in number of channels. In my youth, a group of styli scratched grooves into a roll of foil tape to record aircraft heading, altitude, airspeed, vertical acceleration and time (four parameters, discounting time). Modern ones record many, many hundreds of parameters, some at pretty high resolution.

The appetite for channels and on some parameters, for time resolution has surged along at a rate that would give pause to anyone proposing a real-time uplink scheme, as it would threaten to render obsolete any scheme within a few years. The few satellite systems which provide global coverage without requiring large, actively steered antennas, would not support the required bandwidth, so folks idly proposing this are in fact proposing new satellite systems, probably Low Earth Orbit, which was not much fun for the last batch of firms that tried it. A scheme for which both Bill Gates and Motorola contributed a major business failure needs a careful look before trying again.

How about a quick burst of data, every 20 minutes, indicating the plane's current location. Just a text file with UTM's, altitude and flight speed. It's ridiculous that it took so long to find the airplane.

Heck, the plane could also just have a GPS that kept track of its location (one way data stream) and then broadcast the UTM's in an emergency situation, by radio.

Why would it be necessary to upload all of the data in the CSMU. Basic data such as coordinates would be a good start.

Instead of LEO, is it possible to set up an airborne repeater system on all flights on a similar flight path? That is what packet switching technology is all about.

I am not an engineer, but I suspect more brain power could be effectively applied to the design of black boxes etc. Shooting test equipment from 40 foot cannons at high velocity may not be the only solution.

A repeater system would be similar to the AIS system currently used on ships. However this system is only built to transmit very small amounts of data. If your objective is for very basic tracking and telemetry information, then such a system might be adequate.

However, modern day aircraft generate a tremendous amount of telemetry. Transmitting all the telemetry a plane spits out via airborne repeaters or satellite uplink is probably doable, but any solution would be very expensive. There are maybe a handful of major airline crashes a year, and I gather the vast majority of times the black box is recovered by an someone walking over and picking it up. Is it really worth the money or effort to implement a new system? Probably not.

Less information in hand seems better than loads of information lost at sea. Perhaps, both approaches could be applied in a cost effective manner to transoceanic flights.

Just found this Business week Article:

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The main impediment to any upgrade was, is and always will be the Tombstone mentality of the FAA. Remember this was the bunch of morons that fought the rearming of Pilots and claimed strengthening cockpit doors was "too expensive". Black box recorders are only required to have beacons and sonar pingers that transmit for 30 days. Tough luck if you can't find them within that time frame!

It does not surprise me.

I have been thinking this morning about how the "passive masses" really deserves to get screwed the way it does.

There is no accountability for anything these days and people are so insular they really don't care.