The fatal crash of Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330, over the South Atlantic on June 1, 2009 brought new focus on determining the cause of such inexplicable events - such as when a state-of-the-art aircraft suddenly falls from the sky and is lost, seemingly forever with a loss of 228 lives.

The few tantalizing clues that were transmitted from the aircraft were insufficient to do anything more than suggest a number of possibilities, but nothing definitive as to why an aircraft that appeared to be functioning normally, suddenly went down without any communication from the flight deck.

A series of automatic maintenance messages from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) indicated that the autopilot had disengaged, a computer system had switched to alternative power and that controls to keep the plane stable had been damaged. About three minutes later, more automatic messages reported the failure of systems to monitor air speed, altitude and direction.

The speed at which the tragedy unfolded would indicate that whatever happened, the flight deck had little or no warning of what was clearly a sudden, system-wide catastrophic failure.

The pursuit for answers included the dispatch of multiple assets, airborne and waterborne, to try and recover the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) from under miles of water in one of the deepest areas of the ocean. Millions of dollars were spent, but both ‘black boxes’ remain at the bottom of the sea, and along with them the answers to what really happened.

Six years ago, Western Avionics of Calgary began development of an airborne wireless server platform that was originally intended to provide tracking information obtained from the FDR buss for maintenance and quality assurance purposes.

The Canadian firm says the CommuniCube’s capabilities have reached a point where it is now functioning as a standalone FDR, able to "listen" discreetly and report any and all tolerance breaches, from hot starts to hard landings, and send that data back to the maintenance base via satellite uplink independent of the crew taking action to report said breach.

More important, the system is designed to activate automatically whenever a user-defined parameter is exceeded, or it can be manually initiated by the flight deck crew at any time.

The company says the CommuniCube has been installed successfully in everything from light twins to regional jets, and is operating in a number of countries globally.

Improvements in data compression and satellite communication have reached the point wherein the CommuniCube can communicate - on a virtually live basis - information coming from the FDR buss - and any additional information that the user deems necessary for their operation.

For example, in EMS applications, patient medical information is being streamed ahead of the aircraft to the hospital. And commercial airlines are using the CummuniCube for FOQA (Flight Operations Quality Assurance) tracking.

"Although the CummuniCube is not a certificated replacement for an FDR, which will always remain the final word regarding on-board flight data, the CommuniCube can provide a mirror image of what the FDR was receiving on a nearly live basis to a user-defined terminal anywhere in the world,” Western Avionics official said.

“When the CummuniCube senses any abnormal behavior, it immediately begins sending data, starting with the aircrafts current GPS location, without any pilot input," said Greg Taylor with Western Avionics, Product Development.

But most importantly, the CummuniCube will transmit everything it hears from the FDR buss, virtually live, until the situation is resolved, or until it is no longer able to do so.

In the case of AF447, it is likely that this information would have gone a long way to solving one of the most puzzling airline tragedies in years, the Canadian firm believes.

In the wake of the loss of the Airbus A330 and the inability of searchers to retrieve the jetliner’s ‘black boxes’ from the deep ocean water, interest has grown for continuous data streaming of critical aircraft condition and flight data recorder information to the ground.

The lack of success in locating the CVR and FDR aboard the ill-fated Air France flight prompted Airbus to consider redesign of the critical air safety devices so they broadcast the crucial data in advance of a crash.

Currently, the FDR and CVR simply serve as onboard recording devices. The FDR collects data from aircraft systems, while the CVR records crew conversation and aural warnings heard on the flight deck. The FDR holds 25 hours of data on 88 flight parameters while the CVR stores the final two hours of cockpit audio.

Presently, the devices must be recovered in the wake of an accident after which information can be retrieved from the FDR and CVR in a laboratory by skilled technicians. As designed, the devices do not transmit real time information from an aircraft.

The FDR and CVR work separately from a jetliner’s ACARS, an air-to-ground link that automatically sends operational information, maintenance data and fault reports to the ground. But ACARS does not offer the bandwidth needed for real-time transmission of all the data stored in the digital FDR and CVR.

Airbus is undertaking a study for improving flight data recovery, including, but not limited to, implementation of extended data transmission from commercial airliners, so that in the event of accidents, critical flight information can still be recovered and provided to accident investigation authorities even if finding the black boxes prove futile.

Tom Enders, president and CEO of Airbus says “various technical means for reinforcing flight data recovery and data transmission to ground centers are principally available. We will now study different options for viable commercial solutions, including those where our experience with real-time data transmission from our own test aircraft could support the further development of such solutions." The study will consider technological issues as well as data protection and privacy concerns.

At issue is whether better CVRs and FDRs can be built. Aviation consultants say a constant stream of data from enroute jetliners would produce mountains of irrelevant data. "The volume of information you're talking about is infeasible in terms of what it would cost to do that for every airplane," Ray Oishi, a senior engineering fellow at ARINC, told Business Week. “Airlines would discard virtually all the routine data that was sent. Just because it's imaginable doesn't mean it's practicable."

Some years ago, L-3 Aviation Recorders, the largest maker of flight data recorders, teamed with a satellite company to study the cost of moving to a flight data transmission system. Even assuming a 50 percent reduction in future satellite transmission costs, the study estimated that the price tag would be prohibitive: $300 million annually for a U.S. carrier flying international routes. In comparison, data and voice recorders cost about $20,000 and are certified for 100,000 flight hours, or about 30 years.

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