FOLLOWING THE mysterious fate of MH370, there is now a growing demand worldwide for allowing cockpit voice recordings to be streamed live, so as to avoid the complications and speculation about what happened to the Malaysian Airlines Boeing. A United Nations body is examining proposals for the live streaming of information from aircraft cockpits. In the event of an incident, this would provide investigators with vital information and help in the rapid location of planes that vanish from the radar, as was the case with MH370. The new proposals could also mean that features and gadgets like the black box could be rendered obsolete if live streaming is allowed. As is now known to everyone, the battery-powered ping signals from the black box fade after 30 days.
However, the proposal by the UN?s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is being opposed by many pilots, who say live steaming would be an invasion of privacy since many of the conversations between cockpit crew are of a personal nature and unrelated to the flight. They also say they could be unfairly blamed for unexplained accidents because of something they may say in innocence or as a joke, but could sound incriminating in case there is an incident or a crash. The airline industry has suggested that a better alternative would be a system, which constantly tracks all passenger aircraft via satellite signals. By this method, information would be stored in a computing ?cloud? and be instantly and continually accessible. Details such as adjustments made by pilots as well as altitude, airspeed, direction and other information could then be monitored from the ground.
This is a possible scenario, but requires greater cooperation between countries that have satellites in space, which can monitor aircraft movement and ground stations in different countries collecting data being streamed from the aircraft, which does not include cockpit conversations. Even this, however, has found resistance. Pilots say if you have this massive wave of data that?s going out to satellites and stations from different countries, and it?s not going to be safeguarded and protected, it could lead to problems for pilots in the event of an accident. Any deviation or change in altitude would then be seen as suspicious, even if it was perfectly normal for a pilot, as in a case of avoiding possible turbulence.
The ITU was asked to look into the possibility of live streaming of black box information by the Malaysian government. A Malaysian government official speaking recently at The International Telecommunication World Telecommunications Development Conference in Dubai, said the ITU should develop cutting-edge technology to facilitate transmission of flight data in real time, which would be especially useful in cases like the disappearance of MH370. The Malaysian government believes that data from aircraft, including from the black box, could be continually transmitted and stored in data centres on the ground. ?I urge the ITU to work with the industry to develop a better way to constantly monitor flight data and what was happening inside the cockpit,? he said. Hamadoun Toure, the ITU secretary general, concluded by saying, ?We must ensure that an aircraft can be tracked in real time, so that such an unprecedented and tragic incident does not occur again.? Pilots, however, are still insisting that any such move must meet with their approval.
