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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Air traffic control towers do record radio conversations. But not all conversations in the cockpit are broadcast over radio to the air traffic controllers – a recorder can record those conversations. And another recorder records *non-voice* data, like how the systems on board the plane are operating to help track technical malfunctions and research the causes of accidents.
Have you ever used a satellite phone? They sound like absolute garbage. Very little of the world is covered in high speed internet that would make ground based uploading possible. It’s just not worth it to record and upload everything when there are a handful of plane crashes per year. They also have to find the flight data recorder anyways.
High bandwidth radio has a range of a few miles. Low bandwidth radio – which is what airplanes use – has a range of ~200 miles, but can only send very low quality audio. If a plane is going to crash somewhere that the wreckage can’t be recovered, its going to be crashing somewhere that radio coverage is non-existent.
Starlink recently began offering a service that provides global, high speed satellite internet for airliners. It costs tens of thousands of dollars per plane per month, in addition to an initial hardware cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because of the cost, its mostly targeted towards small jets carrying corporate executives so that they can attend business meetings while flying.
Airlines aren’t rushing to bankrupt themselves in order to livestream their pilots because airplanes don’t crash very often and, when they do, its usually somewhere that the wreckage is easy to recover.
It sounds like you’re proposing to replace one of the two typical “black boxes” – the Cockpit Voice Recorder – with a streaming backhaul to a storage location.
First, note that there is a second “black box” – the Flight Data Recorder – which logs data about the aircraft to help re-create what happened after an accident. With your proposed approach, both voice and data would need to be streamed off the aircraft.
Second, as others have pointed out, there are complexities with reliably transmitting and storing a data stream from a moving vehicle. Ever had your call drop while driving? That type of interruption is not permissible in a high reliability recording system.
Third, transmitting that voice and data requires an antenna. That antenna becomes a single point of failure, such that a bird hitting the antenna would disable all data logging.
While black boxes aren’t cheap, they are the most reliable way to ensure that a snapshot of what happens before a crash survives after the crash.
Head on over to flightradar24.com and see just how many planes are in the air at any given time to get an idea of how much data steaming and storage you’d need, compared to each plane already carrying the recording device onboard (which also helps ensure data integrity and constant signal). The amount of times we can’t find a black box…never mind have an incident occur where we even need to search for one…is exceedingly low. The cost/benefit just isn’t there.
Onboard flight data recorders already keep far more information than is possible/feasible to stream in real time on such a scale. In addition, searching for a black box isn’t really such a time sensitive task where having the data immediately would change anything.
The last fatal commercial aircraft accident in the USA was in 2009. There are 50,000 flights a day.
You’re talking about streaming billions of hours of audio per accident. Even if you could get this down to a dollar an hour, it’s phenomenalally expensive for the benefit it provides.
OH, and unions. Don’t forget the pilot unions, who have successfully fought off video in the cockpit even thought it’s the NTSB’s #1 safety want for commercial aircraft.
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.
ATC here. Are you talking about us listening to the conversations or just a digital log? Because I can tell you when we’re busy, frequency congestion becomes a real problem, and that’s just us giving clearances. If we had to listen to every plane constantly, it would actually cause more problems than it would solve.
This would *decrease* airplane safety.
The cockpit crew needs to be able to talk freely and truthfully with each other, including asking questions like “you seem drowsy, are you OK?” and “you forgot to push that button” and “my arm is feeling a bit numb from too much tennis yesterday. Please take over”.
The black-box recorders now in use are difficult to replay. The airline can’t just decide to pull one out to check if the pilots are following procedure perfectly.
The pilots are OK with the idea that everything they said on the last few flights gets recorded *but then erased.* If there’s an accident or incident, then sure the FAA can pull the recordings and here the copilot say “you forgot to push that button”. They’re ok with that because there actually *was* an accident. They *want* those recordings to happen, so they can prove that nothing they did was the cause of the accident.
But if *every* statement made in the cockpit can get saved forever the pilots would basically start faking parts of the conversations, because that pilot might get fired the next day for forgetting one trivial step in a 1000-step procedure. So instead the co-pilot keeps his mouth shut and pushes the button himself. But that was the wrong thing to do because the pilot simultaneously pushed a different button. Or the copilot waves frantically at the pilot and points at the button, but that distracts the pilot and delays pushing the button.
It’s actually fairly complex to do that because airplanes go in and out of range of towers all the time. So that means that all control towers would need to have a unified system that tracked each individual plane and store their recordings in separate tracks and then all tracks from all towers would be compiled to a single file that would then have to be accessible to their respective airline. This is far more complex than just being recorded and stored on the aircraft
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