I’ve never understood this – I figured it must be because of pilot unions or something along the lines. It’s archaic that we physically search for black boxes rather than have it streamed. And to that point, why not have it video recorded as well? It’s a common practice across many professions – how there can be any justification against it?
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The whole point of a black box is that it can record what was happening in a plane *even during an emergency*. Streaming that data to somewhere else adds many more potential points of failure. If the underlying problem is in the plane’s electrical or communications systems, the data won’t be properly streamed.
So this system could work as a supplement to the current system, but it could never replace it entirely. Its main use case would be scenarios where: (i) a plane crashes while still in communication with ground (so we presumably know where) but (ii) we can’t recover the black box for some reason. That’s a pretty narrow use case.
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