Demystifying science | Black boxes in the clouds

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The feasibility of this approach was proven by Boeing and the Canadian SME Flyht in 2015, but it has not yet been adopted due to its cost.

“There has been a lot of talk about putting black box data on the cloud (cloud) after the accident of Air France Flight 447,” says Captain Mary McMillan, president of the board of directors of Flyht, the Alberta company which demonstrated the proof of concept with Boeing in 2015. Flight AF447 crashed in sea ​​in 2009, after the departure of the Airbus 330 from Rio. Icing problems distorted the reading of some instruments and 228 people died in the accident.

“We knew exactly where the crash took place, but it took two years to locate the black boxes on the ocean floor. It was the only way to know the causes of the accident,” emphasizes M.^me McMillan.

“And 10 years ago, there was also Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. The black boxes were never found despite searches that cost hundreds of millions,” she adds. The Boeing 777 of MH370, a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, made inexplicable changes in trajectory before disappearing in 2014. The cause of the accident, which left 239 dead, was never determined.

Boeing conducted tests with Flyht and Captain McMillan, who was then working for satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat, after a long career as a pilot with United. “It was part of Boeing’s ecoDemonstrator flight research programs,” explains Kent Jacobs, CEO of the Calgary firm, in an interview on the sidelines of a meeting with investors in Montreal in mid-May.

The results were excellent, but the cost would have been ten times that of current black boxes, according to Mr. Jacobs.

Captain McMillan also recalls that the plane is the “most complex and safest means of transportation ever invented.”

Flyht was created in Calgary 20 years ago to leverage black box data regardless of accidents, to improve aircraft performance. Systems launched in recent years by Flyht also improve aircraft ground rotations, to limit delays in emergency repairs and baggage processing, for example.

Avoid the risks of hacking

Will the arrival of low-cost satellite internet, for example with Starlink, be able to reduce costs enough for cloud black boxes to become a reality? No, because the certifications for satellite aerial communications are very strict, to limit the risk of hacking, according to Captain McMillan. She doesn’t think Starlink’s technology could be certified for aerospace security communications.

It’s not a question of the quantity of data, according to Mr. Jacobs: the data in black boxes is equivalent to a little more than a megabyte per second. Starlink shows results ranging from 5 to 260 megabits per second, according to a 2023 PC Mag article.

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