Air Safety Experts: Improve Black Boxes

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For the 256 parameters recorded by a black box, Kavi came up with a volume of data requiring transmission of four to eight kilobits per second. "This is a fraction of what mobile wireless devices transmit today," says Kavi.

Airlines already use ACARS for a number of purposes. The system notifies mechanics on the ground of unusual vibrations in an aircraft's engines, so they can prepare any necessary repairs. Flight crews also use ACARS to send messages to their airlines about delays, or passengers with potential connection problems.

Lufthansa has used ACARS to transform one of its intercontinental aircraft into a flying weather station. Once every 30 minutes, the onboard system reports the temperature, wind speed and atmospheric pressure to a central office in Germany.

This very task was being performed by the ACARS system on board a jumbo jet traveling from São Paulo to Frankfurt during the night of the Air France crash. The data it collected show how quickly the disaster must have unfolded. "Our aircraft was flying through the area of bad weather only half an hour ahead of the Airbus, and the automatic weather data showed nothing unusual," explains Lufthansa spokesman Michael Lamberty.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, a satellite telephone provider called Iridium offered the FAA the use of its radio frequencies for the real-time transmission of flight recorder data. According to the company, "the Iridium system could have an important impact on flight safety."

But transmission of flight data is expensive. It takes up satellite bandwidth. Former NTSB official Francis is familiar with these problems. But he argues that a constant flow of data during flight would not be absolutely necessary. "We would already gain a lot if the system would only transmit data the minute the aircraft entered an unusual situation," he says.

Experts with Germany's Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation in Braunschweig and the European Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne consider it "technically feasible" to report flight data on every flight to a central office via an online system. But pilots are the ones raising objections. "It would be tantamount to the full-scale monitoring of pilots," says Jörg Handwerg of Cockpit, a German pilots' association.

Safety expert Francis knows his proposal affects the personal rights of pilots. For this reason, he says, data would have to be encoded to prevent unauthorized individuals from listening in on radio communications. He also advises against transmitting conversations in the cockpit. "People's last words before they die are part of the private sphere and should not be broadcast around," says Francis, who became known more than 10 years ago as a result of his investigation of the explosion of a TWA jumbo jet near New York.

On the other hand, he says, nothing highlights the need for improved radio transmission of data than last week's desperate search for wreckage from the downed Air France jet. According to Francis, ACARS should always transmit an aircraft's position data, thus enabling rescue teams to search more effectively in an emergency.

"This crash demonstrates, in a drastic way, that we must improve our monitoring systems," he says. In a world in which satellites perform monitoring and navigation tasks, says Francis, it should not be possible for aircraft to simply disappear.

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