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1. Cost SatCom is very expensive. Sure, oil is cheap this quarter, but once it climbs again, airlines will return to their 2% profit margins. Remember, for mos
by twistedpair 11y ago
1. Cost
SatCom is very expensive. Sure, oil is cheap this quarter, but once it climbs again, airlines will return to their 2% profit margins. Remember, for most of the last 20 years, airlines have struggled to break even. If blackboxes and telemetry must be transmitted via satellite continuously, the bill will be substantial. Remember, Iridium was so expensive the company went under. The cost would be Billions, not a "fraction of a million."
2. Does not prevent MH370
Everything on an airliner must have an emergency shutoff. Fire is the worst threat in the air. Swiss Air 111 crashed due to a fire in the cockpit wiring [1]. The first step if there is smoke in a cockpit is to pull breakers, to isolate the problem. Today the pilots can pull the breakers to the engines, flight computers, and black boxes. If these SatComm trackers were added, they would have been disabled by the same party that disabled all the other communications on MH370. As such, they don't fix the problem of a pilot that doesn't want to be found.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111