According to some news reports, the wreckage of the crashed Airbus A330 Air France flight 447 (apparently with no survivors, 228 people dead) may be strewn on the ocean floor for several miles as deep as 14 000 feet beneath the surface. Barring a miracle, the black box (flight data recorder) and the cockpit voice recorder are lost forever, so the investigators may never be able to solve the mysterious crash.
We need a drastic change in the method of handling the flight data and we need it now! So grab your trusty pencils (err…word processing software…) and fire up a letter to the FAA or your country’s aviation regulators and ask them to establish and mandate a data transmission process from all commercial flights immediately.
A copy of all data, including cockpit chatter, should be transmitted in real time, or in frequent bursts, to the airline and – hopefully – to some highly regulated and closely supervised independent data storage/escrow agency. Some data is already being sent automatically (even from flight 447) but that’s not nearly enough: the content of the black box and cockpit voice recorder must be saved in a different physical location; entrusting vital data exclusively to some archaic device that can be lost or damaged quite easily is oh so twentieth-century! C’mon, good crash data equals better safety for everybody and even in these difficult economic times safety is cheaper than even a single air disaster!
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