Hello everyone.

Apologies if this already appeared in previous pages, Bloomberg has a somewhat interesting piece on why is flight data 'trapped' in commercial aircraft (it also offer plenty of links to other useful summaries of what is currnetly known about MH370).

This is the interesting part:

Why not transmit this flight data off the plane so it’s accessible almost instantly Airlines, after all, track each of their flights everywhere in the world and can advise crews on course adjustments, security alerts, quick weather changes, and a host of other situations. Passengers are routinely offered in-air Wi-Fi and live television these days. So why keep vital data trapped on the plane?

The answer is mostly about one issue: cost. Sending all the data from each flight in real time via satellite would be enormously expensive. A 2002 study by L-3 Aviation Recorders (LLL) and a satellite provider found that a U.S. airline flying a global network would need to spend $300 million per year to transmit all its flight data, even assuming a 50 percent reduction in future satellite transmission costs. And that’s just a single airline. Commercial airline disasters, meanwhile, are becoming even more uncommon as technology and techniques improve—in part thanks to lessons from past crashes—so there’s little incentive for investing heavily in real-time data.