[GeorgeTirebiter]

This seems nuts to me. You want ALL the data transmitted off the vehicle to ground stations, once a second or something like that. Sure, keep on-vehicle for backup, but only for backup. You get a continuous data stream to the ground for every plane. I mean, how much data are we talking about here? A few 10s of kb/sec for voice, maybe the same for compressed sensor data? Here we are in 2023 and we can't get a 50 kb/s stream from each airplane to the ground? Really?

[adgjlsfhk1]

part of the problem is that it has to go to satellites since the Pacific exists. the other thing is that they aren't made to survive adversarial attacks by pilots. if the pilot wants to bring a plane down, they will, and a better blackbox won't tell you anything other than that you shouldn't have let them in the cockpit.

[thanzex]

This comment makes no sense.

1- If the airline industry really had a problem about paying for a low bandwidth satellite data link for a 100MM $ aircraft, they could optimize things, such as using ground data links 90% of the time while switching to satellite only in the middle of the ocean.

2- If a pilot is suicidal, black boxes don't help either. It's like saying we don't a better car safety systems, if someone really wants to die they will smash their car to a tree. That's not why BBs exist. Even knowing that a pilot was the cause of a crash helps immensely in analysing their mental state prior to the event, you know, to prevent it from happening again.

That's realy the key there, you have a 100+Tons of metal and fuel with 100:300 people on board going close to the speed of sound. It NEEDS to be safe, but unfortunately, accidents happen. In such an event you HAVE TO know what happened, know if it was an accident or a voluntary action, the fault of equipment, software, procedure, pilot, ATC , anything really. Every procedure/safety system/training/design specification/ecc.. is literally written in blood from past mistakes.

If i know I shouldn't have left that pilot in the cockpit, great! I'll make sure no other pilot gets in that same mental condition.

[samtho]

The advantage of a local storage is a ruggedized recorder will not need to maintain any sort of wireless com link, as it’s stored on the physical unit. If you introduce any number of factors such as in-air separation of the aircraft, trauma to any sort of connection, or just random stuff that will occur during a crash, the antenna (which will need to be mounted outside the aircraft) is very likely break or become disconnected.