It “s a huge tragedy, and my heart goes to the survivors of 228 passengers who left Rio, but never arrived to Paris.

The black boxes landed somewhere 3000 meters deep in the ocean and their batteries supporting emitting signals will die in 30 days.

The chances are very slim that the boxes from the crashed Air France plane will be found, and the world will never learn if this was a one time failure or some serious design issue of that particular aircraft model.

I wonder why air industry is still using such a bogus method as black boxes?

I would do it differently ndash; in addition to recording in black boxes in planes, 100% of the pilots ” conversations should transmitted as an audio stream to a server located on the ground at the closest to the vehicle control center ‘s. This way in case of the aircraft crash all the data about the accident would be available immediately. No need to spend millions trying to locate and get a hold of the black boxes. Huge cost savings…

Technically, implementing such a solution is not too difficult. A number of the aircrafts (at least in the USA) already offer the internet connection on board even to the passengers. Identifying a closest to the vehicle server of a particular network is also a no brainer. Streaming audio is a trivial software task too.

I ‘m sure, some airline must be doing this already.

The most difficult part is to bring all the world carriers to the same table, agree on the infrastructure, and develop the software and the new “black boxes rdquo;. A simple commodity computer like a netbook placed in a sturdy case can perform the duties of such transmitter. A central server would automatically aggregate the fragments of the received audio and deliver the complete file to the authorities of the airline the plane belongs to.

Why the world doesn “t do it yet? It “s the 21st century. Talking about rich Internet applications and cloud computing hellip;

I “d be happy to get involved in such a project myself. Guys, let “s do it hellip;Anyone?