An Idea

Mon Sep 17 14:04:58 UTC 2001

On Saturday, September 15, 2001, at 12:14 AM, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:
>
> 1) In addition to traditional "black boxes" there would be
> transmitters in planes that would transmit flight data to a network of
> ground stations that would record the data.  The storage problems
> would not be too bad as recordings would be recycled after N days.

> 4) The transmitters should be designed and installed so that they
> would be difficult to disable while a plane is in flight.

Piggy-backing the signal on the in-flight telephone system would fit 
these criteria.  Airfone (GTE?), and probably its competitors, have 
130-some ground stations designed for signal coverage over most of the 
US and neighboring countries/oceans - they switch over to satellite 
service when out of range of the US infrastructure.  The antenna is on 
the belly of the aircraft.  The whole system should be able to run on 
one channel, squeezing the data portions in around the framing around 
the voice data.

-Bill