Volume 8 Number (Journal 668) May, 2015 in this issue

Cost a Factor in Streaming Flight Data in Real Time 
By Jad Mouawad/The New York Times 
The crash of the Germanwings passenger jet in the French Alps has once again raised the 
question of whether commercial airplanes should transmit flight information in real time. 
The crash comes as the aviation industry, regulators and pilots have been grappling with 
the question of real-time flight monitoring, particularly since the disappearance last year of 
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. In 2009, the crash of Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic 
highlighted the shortcomings of the existing technology after it took search teams two 
years to locate the plane's black boxes. 
Regulators and airlines are weighing whether the cost of the extra technology needed for such monitoring 
would be justified given the fact that airline crashes have become increasingly rare. Last year was the safest 
year on record for commercial flight. 
Still, the Germanwings crash has revived the question of whether pilots should be videotaped during flight. 
This year, the National Transportation Safety Board endorsed the use of cockpit videos as one of eight 
recommendations to help investigators and emergency medical workers react faster to accidents. 
The safety agency said that all flight data and cockpit voice recorders should have a tamper-resistant mode to 
broadcast to a ground station enough information to establish a crash site within about seven miles. In 
practice, this could include either a recorder that would eject at impact or some form of data streaming. 
It also called for low-frequency devices that can broadcast their location for 90 days; such "pings" are 
already embedded in two black boxes, but their batteries are required to last only 30 days and their range is 
limited. Airlines have argued, however, that real-life monitoring and the transmission of thousands of flight 
parameters would be too onerous given the number of flights a day and the volume of data that would have 
to be collected. 
While modern planes often have sophisticated satellite communications equipment, they are I not required to 
broadcast their position in real time to air traffic controllers. In these cases, airlines require pilots to send 
satellite messages or radio their position at set periods. 
But this also means that planes flying over oceans or in areas where radar coverage is scarce can vanish from 
view. This explains why finding Air France Flight 447 was so challenging. Few in the industry expected that 
another plane would ever disappear entirely and never be found, as has been the case with the Malaysian jet. 
The Air Line Pilots Association, the largest pilot union in the country, is opposed to the use of "cockpit 
image recorders," saying that they are an invasion of privacy and that existing technology provides ample 
information about what happens on a plane. 
"There isn't really a need for such a thing," said Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot and the author of "Ask the 
Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel." “It’s very rarely that the so-called black boxes are 
not recovered,” Mr. Smith said. 

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May, 2015 RUPANEWS