eli5 Why can’t black boxes in Aeroplanes update data to a cloud throughout a flight or after a crash has occured? why do we need to find the physical box?
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Cloud technology has advanced very quickly in the past 20 years by using the strategy “move fast and break things”. This is very common in Silicon Valley but it is NOT how the aircraft industry operates. They prefer the strategy “if it works, leave it the fuck alone”.
Changing anything on an airplane requires tons of research, testing, and certification. The manufacturer wants to know that it works. The airline wants to know that it works. The FAA wants 10,000 pages of reports saying that it works.
At first glance all of the rules and check lists for changing systems on airplanes might seem like a barrier to progress, and in many cases it is. But airplanes as they currently operate are ridiculously safe. I don’t want anyone changing anything without a very very good reason and lots of evidence that it’s safer than the current system.
Improving data collection on crashes sounds important, but by the numbers it’s actually hard to make a case that it is. The current rate of deadly crashes on major airlines is about one in 50,000,000 flights. If we had much better information about crashes maybe we could reduce that by 25%. If so, crashes would go down to one in 67,000,000. That sounds great, but if getting better data requires ANY change to the construction, controls, or procedures of an airplane there is some risk that those changes could cause a crash. Therefore to make that change you have to provide lots of lots of evidence that your change is not going to disrupt anything. Even if you can prove that a change that you would like to make has a less than one in 1,000,000 chance of causing a problem, that is NOT good enough for air travel. You need to prove to the manufacturer, the airline, and the FAA that the change you propose has leas than a 1/50,000,000 chance of going wrong.
The testing and verification required for that is very expensive, millions or tens of millions of dollars. Why pay it if you don’t have to? In the last 20 years the only big change in airplanes is that their engines are more fuel efficient. Worldwide airlines spend almost $100 billion per year on fuel. Modern engines have cut that by about 20%. That change is worth spending $10,000,000 on testing and certification. A cloud connected black box? Not so much.
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