Oliver McGee, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Technology Policy in the Clinton Administration , has made the very sensible suggestion that perhaps it is time for black box recorders to be moved to the cloud at the very least for “essential limited flight recorder data for long flights over areas like the Indian Ocean, or other remote areas across large land masses like across the Brazilian Amazon” – he commented to ConsumerAffairs. This makes a lot of sense in the wake of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 incident and indeed the idea was also raised following the fatal crash of Air France Flight 447. This technology is available for every smartphone so why not aircraft? Cost is always a determining factor but considering the fallout from the incident by the airlines in terms of actual loss and reputational damage, the cost of implementing cloud recording technology would certainly outweigh the cost of losing an aircraft. Another factor cited by experts is the lack of any consistent bandwidth over the more remote areas of the world to be able to transmit such large amounts of data but even small pieces of information could be sufficient to help locate a missing aircraft or at least help identify the cause of its disappearance. For airlines that are quick to use technology such as Google Glass for its first class staff to be able to better serve its high-fee paying customers, which Virgin Atlantic is currently trialling, then implementing cloud technology for its aircraft transmission data could be seen as a competitive advantage for the airline rather than a simple cost to the bottom line.
Time to reassess black box technology?
