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?

Question

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?

In: 846

Answer 1

There’s no guarantee that you’ll have a channel to transmit all that information, and even if you did, that it would arrive intact. Hence you store it locally for later retrieval.