New "black box" could stream data in real time

You know the old joke that goes, "If the black box on an airplane is so indestructible, why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box?"

Well, why don't they just upgrade the black box so that it's not necessary at all?

Black boxes may show a remarkable ability to survive crashes and other disasters, but they bear a fatal flaw: You still have to find them after the incident to get the data off the device. In cases like the mysterious disappearance of Air France 447, which crashed into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in June, recovery of the black box can be difficult. In fact, flight 447's flight recorder has still not been recovered and some fear it may never be. Airplane manufacturer Airbus says it is ready to spend up to 20 million euros to find it.

When flight 447 went down, many (including myself) were surprised to find out that aviation agencies have no means of even tracking airplanes when they aren't over land and are out of radar range. That's shocking in a world where a $300 GPS device can pinpoint your location within a matter of feet anywhere on earth. Why don't air traffic systems have these capabilities? And why bother storing flight data on tape or other local storage media that's kept on the plane? Why not stream that data to servers on the ground so it can be recorded -- on a server located somewhere that's not hurtling through the sky -- in real time?

That's the idea behind Canada-based AeroMechanical Services Ltd's upgraded "smart box," which is designed to send bursts of data to web servers on the ground, recording GPS-based location information as well as key flight data information as it happens. The device can also record and transmit voice data much like a satellite phone. The key, though, is that it's all stored in a safe place instead of on a plane that's about to crash.

The challenge with such a device is that it uses the Iridium satellite phone network to relay the data, and that network has limited bandwidth and might become overloaded if hundreds or thousands of planes tried to use the network simultaneously. AeroMechanical says its proprietary compression system alleviates this problem (but, hey, they always say that).

Unlike many future-tech stories, real-time black box technology may be closer than we think. The company says 30 airlines are already on board to buy the product, and at least one customer will start installing them on a trial basis within a few weeks.