Do we need black boxes anymore?

Skuxx

I was just thinking recently is there a need for black box flight data recorders on board aircraft anymore? The technology is surely there that the parameters could be sent to somewhere on the ground rather than being stored on board the A/C and risk getting lost or destroyed if the plane goes down?
Ryanair are able to use satelites for passenger communications so surely something similar could be used to send the data to the ground rather than storing it in the black boxes?
Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems logical to me

seamus

I imagine the problem is that not all aircraft or airfields would have the facilities to do this.

You also have to consider connectivity issues. What happens if the aircraft loses contact with the ground station for whatever reason - it happens.

With a black box at least you can be fairly sure that the recorder will never lose connection with the instruments unless the plane has disintegrated.

However, it would make sense to supplement the black box with a data stream so that in the event of a crash, the black box only needs to be found if the data stream went dead. It could save time and money, particularly in the case of water crashes.

Such a data feed would also allow ground-based control systems to monitor the aircraft and alert for any problems which the crew may not spot.

cml387

There's agood case for having both.
Any information we have from the Air France crash over the Atlantic came from the ACARS telemetry.It wouldn't be beyond technology to include at least one voice channel encoded.

John_Mc

The cost of uploading the data every few minutes through Satellite makes it prohibitively expensive, and it's not 100% reliable.