Disappearance Of A Second Airliner In Five Years Spurs Interest In Flight Data Recording Streaming

The NTSB said last week that it was studying the possibility of live streaming of flight data recorder information. Joe Kolly, the director of research and engineering for the NTSB made no comments regarding the disappearance of flight MH 370 in an interview with Reuters, but he said discussions about live streaming of black box data from airliners are more prevalent now because it took nearly 2 years to recover the flight data box from the Air France jet that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Brazil to France in 2009.

In the discussions with Kolly, he indicated that working groups are meeting to determine such things as what type of data a system like this would need to transmit and what event would trigger the data to be recorded.

A Canadian company, FLYHT Aerospace Solutions, is working on an automated flight information reporting system that can also stream black box data in emergencies. Their system could serve as a basis for determining what is needed. Richard Hayden, a company director with FLYHT said there was growing interest in his company's technology.

It stands to reason that the disappearance of flight MH 370 will add more to the discussions on about flight data recorder streaming of information.

FMI: www.ntsb.gov