Shouldn't commercial airlines duplicate their "black boxes" in the cloud, in real time? Why not?

Not speaking to the airline pros out there
Be mindful as well of why commercial aircraft have FDR/CVRs in the first place. They are there to help accident investigators find out post hoc why the aircraft arrived at the incident/crash site. What they aren’t for is real time data analysis for maintenance or looking for cost savings. Some aircraft have systems that do these jobs and a separate data stream for that purpose. It is difficult, if not well neigh impossible to factor out willful abuse/neglect by human beings in the chain if they are determined to do things like fly into a mountain like Germanwings 9525 in 2015, or find a method of circumventing a transponder. What you can do is satisfy what factors led to the crash. Every improvement in airline safety today has been paid for in blood and tears.

Personally, I think it’s only a matter of time before the bandwidth is sufficiently inexpensive that something like real time telemetry of most commercial flights is a reality, much like instrumented military ranges are for fighters. I also think it will be a decade or more away and will likely be an extension of ACARS. Maybe Tesla, Google and Boeing will team up and make massively inter networked airliners. :slight_smile: