Ask HN: Why are flight blackbox data still not uploaded to cloud?
After doing some research into this matter I was surprised to find that we're still relying on oldschool physical blackbox to get flight data. But why? In this [1] Quora question a person claims to have gotten an answer from NTSB. They have two main arguments:
1. Data is too big that we don't have technology to deal with that much information
2. There are security concerns since people can intercept data.
I don't understand either of the arguments. Here are my thoughts:
1. Some basic search [2] leads us that there are approx in the order of 10k airplanes in the sky. Assuming there are no periods of time where flight traffic is orders of magnitude worse (since countries live in different timezones) seems like the problem we're trying to solve is streaming data from 10k clients. Assuming the biggest bandwidth bottleneck will be audio (since there is no video data and physical data is relatively cheap) we can reduce this problem to streaming movie from 10k clients at any given time. It seems like one way to verify this problem is tractable is counting how many people uploading video to youtube any given moment and finding out the delta between total video length and transmission latency. While I don't have any real numbers, it seems like a tractable problem.
2. Similarly, this seems like a problem that we already should be able to solve. AES encrypted keyboards, encrypted mouses etc come to mind; or even basic HTTPS.
Could someone please explain this layman why this problem is so hard? If someone were to attack this problem and maybe found a startup, what resources should they refer to?
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-airplanes-still-use-black-boxes-while-all-data-could-be-saved-real-time-to-servers-on-land-through-the-Internet
[2]: https://www.quora.com/How-many-airplanes-are-in-flight-on-average-at-any-given-time-worldwide