Installation does not seem to be cheap. If you watch the timelapse [0], it does take a while to do that. Although I know Rolls Royce engines already do send their data to satellite, but I am not sure by which means.
What I am interested, is feasibility this: nowadays you can buy sailor lifejackets with personal EPIRB which pings the satellite with your location. I am sure that is a lot of waste weight, but then, Lufthansa is still serving food with steel utensil, so maybe its not as bad.
Also, randomly searching info about black boxes, I've found they have option for 90 day pinger batteries. Perhaps that could've aided MH370 search.
All the planes that disappeared recently (MH370, Egyptair, or AF447) all already had txt based systems that were sending home txt based maintenance messages. All it would take is to also ping a gps coordonate every minute. Doesn't seem very complicated to me. Probably doesn't even require a hardware upgrade.
If they had sent position, altitude and heading every minute (which requires very little bandwidth) literally millions of dollars would have been saved with both AF447 (which had ACARS info every 10min) and MH370
>Or just continously upload the data to the internet, should be quite feasible these days with satellites everywhere.
That would probably be a bit too much for existing satellite communication systems; while most flights wouldn't need to transmit such a signal most of the time (If a plane went missing over, say, the Midwest, we'd find it!), frequent transmissions from every flight over sea, for instance would probably overload today's networks - meaning you'd need to launch new satellites to provide this service, meaning it would be outrageously expensive, meaning it wouldn't happen.
However, if we relax the requirement to, say, once every five minutes or so, at least you'll have a much better idea of where something went down than 'Probably somewhere in the southern hemisphere.'
A quick googling tells me there are about 10000-15000 planes in the air around the world. GPS coordinates take less than 100 bytes, but let's give some headroom for plane ID, timestamp, etc.
That would mean about 1.5 megabytes per minute, globally. I think the global satellite network is easily up to the task.
The raw data rate is pretty low, but keep in mind that there's all sorts of signaling traffic going on just to establish a connection, depending on protocol requiring multiple transmit/receive cycles - which in turn means waiting. Again depending on protocol, you may also have to handle collisions (more than one transmission in the same channel at the same time) etc - while still maintaining service for the network's regular customers.
Multiple short transmissions are more taxing than a few long ones.
Make it every 5min or 15min and most of the technical problems drop right out. And it's still super useful for this kind of thing at 20% or 7% of the bandwidth.
What I am interested, is feasibility this: nowadays you can buy sailor lifejackets with personal EPIRB which pings the satellite with your location. I am sure that is a lot of waste weight, but then, Lufthansa is still serving food with steel utensil, so maybe its not as bad.
Also, randomly searching info about black boxes, I've found they have option for 90 day pinger batteries. Perhaps that could've aided MH370 search.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFvwtfxPwac