Why Don’t Airplane Black Boxes Transmit to Land?

June 5, 2009 at 3:08 pm · No Comments · Technology

Jesse Davis, my friend and another Madison based entrepreneur, asks this question in his post today called Thinking Outside the Black Box. He says:

Instead of spending billions (literally) of dollars developing black boxes that can resist 5,000 degree heat, impact of the highest magnitudes, and can send radio transponder signals from depths of 12,000 feet below sea level for up to 30 days, someone should have suggested the possibility of a solution that lies outside the black box.

Why can’t black boxes transmit their data in real time to a backup station via the internet or cell phone transponder? It seems like it would be a fairly simple engineering project, but it has not been done yet. Hopefully some engineer is working on this project right now and works harder and faster because of the recent Air France crash. It would seem like this idea would be something that both the government and the airlines would love to have.