On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 11:06:59PM -0400, Grace, Terry wrote:
With all of the difficulties piecing together what occurred on the aircraft, a friend and I were throwing around some wild ideas. One that I thought had some merit was to have all instrumentation output, voice and even possibly video (flight deck and cabin) continuosly downlinked to ground stations or uplinked to satellites enroute.
Yes, I've had a similar idea: 1) In addition to traditional "black boxes" there would be transmitters in planes that would transmit flight data to a network of ground stations that would record the data. The storage problems would not be too bad as recordings would be recycled after N days. 2) The transmitted data would be sent encrypted and only the ciphertext would be recorded by the ground stations. Encryption would be done using symmetric ciphers. The encryption key would be set before every flight by a NTSB technician, and known only by the NTSB (or the equivalent agency if the flight originates overseas). 3) Since the transmitters don't have to survive an impact they wouldn't have to be terribly expensive so you'd be able to intall them even on relatively small aircraft. 4) The transmitters should be designed and installed so that they would be difficult to disable while a plane is in flight. 5) Decryptions and correlation of data from multiple ground stations need only be done if needed, after the fact. 6) Overseas flights might need to switch to some sort of satellite system. This would probably be more expensive so would probably be limited to larger aircraft. Jeff