re: Official Thread: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

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Long-range surveillance planes from Australia, the US and New Zealand have been scouring a vast tract of the southern Indian Ocean since Tuesday with the search focused on an area of 305,000 square kilometres (122,000 square miles), some 2,600 kilometres southeast of Perth.

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yes, I realize the date is the 16th of march on the picture.

>>>>this 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'.

it doesnt make sense to me this black box is the best way to keep all this data when you got a $30 million dollar airplane, how much could it cost to store the data remotely instead of buried in a box?<<<<<

There was some woman on Fox who is a former NTSB official that said the same thing.

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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."