Sunday, July 31, 2011

The future of the black box flight recorder explored (Wired UK)

The future of the black box flight recorder explored (Wired UK): "The tragedy of Air France 447 might have been on the minds of executives from Bombardier, the Canadian aircraft manufacturer, when they announced in 2010 that their new CSeries narrow-body jets, scheduled to come to market in 2013, would be the first commercial airliners built with the capability to transmit telemetry data instead of merely recording it. The idea -- to stream black-box data in real time, either directly to a ground station or by satellite relay -- isn't new, even though there remains no consensus on whether to call it an uplink, which is conceptually accurate, or a downlink, which expresses the physical relationship of an aeroplane to the ground."