re: Official Thread: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

quote:

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his may be a stupid question, but what's the purpose of the black box anyway??

we have high speed internet access, can't all the telemetry, etc. from an airplane be stored in a cloud? the idea of a black box on the airplane containing all the relevant data seems..well...'quaint'.

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You mean just like ACARS which in this case for whatever reason quit transmitting data early in the flight.

"The introduction of the interface in the early 1990s between the flight data acquisition and management system, the aircraft condition monitoring system and the ACARS management unit resulted in wider acceptance of datalinks on the part of airlines. The flight data acquisition and management system and the aircraft condition monitoring system systems which analyze engine aircraft and operational performance conditions now provide performance data to the airlines on the ground in real time using the ACARS network."