hairy1:

KiwiNZ: I wonder if the Black boxes can be changed so they not only record data they upload the data. 

This already happens for some parameters. It goes via..... you guessed it... ACARS...

ACARS via sat is expensive and as everyone wants a cheap flight these days this data gathering is an expensive way to get ACMS off the aircraft.

hairy1: It will certainly be interesting to see what implications this has for the world wide aircraft fleet. Pretty much anything on an aircraft can be turned off (with a switch and a circuit breaker) due to fire risk. A continuous tracking device inaccessible from the flight deck would create some implementation headaches. 

mattwnz:

hairy1: It will certainly be interesting to see what implications this has for the world wide aircraft fleet. Pretty much anything on an aircraft can be turned off (with a switch and a circuit breaker) due to fire risk. A continuous tracking device inaccessible from the flight deck would create some implementation headaches. 

They really need a system that can track the aircraft, which is totally independent of the electrical system in a plane.  It is really only luck that they could track the pings of the aircraft, as that isn't something most people were aware of. If that hadn't existed, then we wouldn't have any idea where it is at all. If the airline had subscribed to that $10 service which sends information back to land, they possibly would have probably known the location a lot earlier, which could have meant that search teams could have been dispatched to that area to look for survivors. Because it is two weeks down the track, no one could survive in the sea for that long. It is possibly a question people now need to ask of their airline when booking overseas travel, whether they subscribe to that service.

Technofreak:

hairy1:

KiwiNZ: I wonder if the Black boxes can be changed so they not only record data they upload the data. 

This already happens for some parameters. It goes via..... you guessed it... ACARS...

ACARS via sat is expensive and as everyone wants a cheap flight these days this data gathering is an expensive way to get ACMS off the aircraft.

Yep, ACARS does a lot of this now. As I understand it ACARS will use a one of the VHF radios as first choice, the HF radios as second choice and then satellite as the third choice.  It doesn't rely on one medium to transmit the signal.

Technofreak:
It's locked now from take off actually before take off.  There's the possibility that the crew could be incapacitated and there is no way of anyone getting into the cockpit to resolve the situation, the aircraft just flies until it runs out of fuel, this could even be the case in the MH370 incident.

mattwnz:
They really need a system that can track the aircraft, which is totally independent of the electrical system in a plane.

networkn: Apparently back to Pilot Suicide, but I can't see it somehow. To kill yourself you would just get to say 10K feet and point the nose at the ground, it's over. Secondly, not many people would kill themselves at the expense of 238 other peoples lives. Seems insufficient motive to my mind.