With all of the difficulties piecing together what occurred on the aircraft, a friend and I were throwing around some wild ideas. One that I thought had some merit was to have all instrumentation output, voice and even possibly video (flight deck and cabin) continuosly downlinked to ground stations or uplinked to satellites enroute. Yes, this would be a lot of data even with some type of encoding to reduce the volume and would be very costly to implement sonsidering the computing power alone required to correlate it in realtime, but considering that the information could saves lives, provide early warning to all sorts of troubles, etc, IMHO, worth it. Far fethced idea? Yes. Possible? I don’t know.
Yes, I've had a similar idea:
1) In addition to traditional "black boxes" there would be
transmitters in planes that would transmit flight data to a network of
ground stations that would record the data. The storage problems
would not be too bad as recordings would be recycled after N days.
2) The transmitted data would be sent encrypted and only the
ciphertext would be recorded by the ground stations. Encryption would
be done using symmetric ciphers. The encryption key would be set
before every flight by a NTSB technician, and known only by the NTSB
(or the equivalent agency if the flight originates overseas).
3) Since the transmitters don't have to survive an impact they
wouldn't have to be terribly expensive so you'd be able to intall them
even on relatively small aircraft.
4) The transmitters should be designed and installed so that they
would be difficult to disable while a plane is in flight.
5) Decryptions and correlation of data from multiple ground stations
need only be done if needed, after the fact.
6) Overseas flights might need to switch to some sort of satellite
system. This would probably be more expensive so would probably be
limited to larger aircraft.
Jeff
2) The transmitted data would be sent encrypted and only the
ciphertext would be recorded by the ground stations. Encryption would
be done using symmetric ciphers. The encryption key would be set
before every flight by a NTSB technician, and known only by the NTSB
(or the equivalent agency if the flight originates overseas).
With the greatest of respect at this time, I still wish that US posters would
consider the outside world. I find it difficult to believe, genuinely, that
after what happened last week, people still have the mindset that US-based
agencies somehow have worldwide authority and access. The NTSB is a US agency,
and any scheme like this - which in my mind has great merit - would need the
oversite of an international agency to work.
Peter
God, I am an idiot. I then re-read this and noticed the parenthesised comment.
Aplologies to the original poster, but to some extent from the content of other
posting I have seen, my feelings still stand.
rgds,
Piggy-backing the signal on the in-flight telephone system would fit these criteria. Airfone (GTE?), and probably its competitors, have 130-some ground stations designed for signal coverage over most of the US and neighboring countries/oceans - they switch over to satellite service when out of range of the US infrastructure. The antenna is on the belly of the aircraft. The whole system should be able to run on one channel, squeezing the data portions in around the framing around the voice data.
-Bill