As I write this, in the aftermath of the Air France tragedy, the so-called black boxes' recovery from an unknown resting place thousands of feet under the waves is not certain. What if, I mused, a plane's vital operating statistics were streamed to a secure server somewhere, dry and on-shore?
Apparently it's not a new idea, in fact it's old enough to have come to Katie Couric's attention. Of all people, she covered it on the CBS news this evening, where I learned that, as with most things, the obstacles are not technical as much as financial (lots of planes, lots of data, lots of bandwidth, lots of servers) and organizational (pilots look at it as 'big brother' watching their every move in real-time.)
That's most often the case; new ideas are technically possible long before all the inertial barriers to implementation come down. I guess those arguing against the idea aren't paying the salvage team's salaries or braving mid-Atlantic storms, looking for a tiny breadbox in a great big ocean, all to find a cause for the decade's worst airline disaster.
Ah well. It's still a good idea.
Apparently it's not a new idea, in fact it's old enough to have come to Katie Couric's attention. Of all people, she covered it on the CBS news this evening, where I learned that, as with most things, the obstacles are not technical as much as financial (lots of planes, lots of data, lots of bandwidth, lots of servers) and organizational (pilots look at it as 'big brother' watching their every move in real-time.)
That's most often the case; new ideas are technically possible long before all the inertial barriers to implementation come down. I guess those arguing against the idea aren't paying the salvage team's salaries or braving mid-Atlantic storms, looking for a tiny breadbox in a great big ocean, all to find a cause for the decade's worst airline disaster.
Ah well. It's still a good idea.
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