Your papers please

[mmotyka at lsil.com]

David Honig <honig at sprynet.com> wrote :
>>fishing through wreckage for a crumpled black box recorder seems pretty
>>old fashioned, too.
>>
>
>30K planes in the air before; maybe 20K now (or 30K 2/3rds full..).
>Lots of data from mobile senders.  [Yes, some of the 30K are too small to
>be interesting.]
>Though now perhaps you could do it by piggybacking on the cellphone 
>mesh?   Cheaper than satellite.  
>(Though what about hitting multiple cells, the non-EMI reason for not
>using cells on planes)
>
>N years ago a robust tape recorder was the best you could do;
>N/2 years ago a solid state recorder became reasonable.  For some
>value of N.  Now RF (digitally encoded, bursty?) is feasible.
>
There is no reason not to have redundant systems - record locally and
remotely. This goes for airline black boxes and personal record
keeping...