The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will reignite debate over new technology to help investigators in the event of a crash, The Wall Street Journal reported.
This includes the possibility of transmitting data automatically using satellite links to send critical safety information from an airliner to the ground.
Such a system could replace traditional “black boxes”, which carry digital flight data and cockpit conversations, but which are often damaged or lost after a crash.
“We can no longer leave it to the vagaries of finding black boxes in every crash.”
William McCabe, who has extensive military and corporate-aircraft management experience, told WSJ:
“The time has come for change,” he said, so industry officials can “get to a point where they are not so dependent on finding the black boxes.”
The use of Wi-Fi on flight could also help transmission of safety data, industry officials say.
The debate followed the Air France crash in June 2009, killing 228 people. Air France Flight 447’s black boxes were retrieved after 23 months of searching, and eventually revealed faulty airspeed indicators as cause of the crash.
It again got air-safety experts including European aviation regulators into thinking other ways to beam down safety data during emergency.
Jet makers such as Boeing and Airbus already have adopted data link communications to send status reports, as an alternative to radio, said WSJ.
With the latest incident involving the MAS flight, those dealing with aviation emergencies say the time is right to reignite interest in the proposed alternative.
“It’s a terrific idea, and the Air France crash certainly taught us that,” said Robert Clifford, a Chicago-based veteran plaintiff’s attorney.
“If we have a repeat of the long and difficult recovery process in that accident, he said, “the drive to install new technology is certainly going to escalate,” he told WSJ.
The paper added that although Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner fleet is monitored in real-time – its former chief program engineer received notifications on his BlackBerry whenever a 787 transmitted problem – it is not clear whether MAS officials have received such messages.
Contrast this to the United Continental flight which diverted to New Orleans in 2012: Boeing knew about the problem even before they were contacted by airline officials. – March 10, 2014.
-Malaysiainsider
