| what yakov says isn't fully accurate. there are 4 voice channels that sum up to around 50kbit. and the fdr recording data is specified at around 12kbit. check the bea working group document ironically part of my master thesis is about blackboxes and satellites. iridium has been working with some company about the topic(i think, i wish i remembered the details, but you can just google them). but generally iridium is slow right now(that might change but when i say slow i mean less than 4kbit slow), and i think the main reason why it's still there is because it covers the poles. rolls royce actually already deployed a thing that transfers data through satellites, so you can actually get live engine data. this is almost ironic since their engines seem to be so crappy that a significant portion of them requires replacement according to qantas. inmarsat on the other hand is much faster. you have to consider though, in a lot of regions you have way more planes than you have bandwidth. also inmarsat is already heavily used by ships(which from what i heard have a lot of virus infested windows pc's sending bogus junk). there is no way the main issue is that we can easily have way more planes than we have bandwidth per spot beam [] http://www.bea.aero/en/enquetes/flight.af.447/flight.data.re... [] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10... [] http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/mon... [] http://www.inmarsat.com/about-us/our-satellites/ |