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(1) Starlink for airplanes is very expensive. Multiply that by many many thousands of planes and its $$$$$$$$. (2) With that many planes you start to get into

(1) Starlink for airplanes is very expensive. Multiply that by many many thousands of planes and its $$$$$$$$. (2) With that many planes you start to get into Starlink bandwidth issues. Cant it support that many? I honestly don't know (3) Its a new complicated piece of equipment that may fail. What if the transmitter is broken? Blackbox systems are much simpler (4) A lot of this data is already transmitted (speed, altitude, position, etc, just not voice), so no need to build a system for it.

panick21_ 3y ago
There are many other system other then Starlink you could also use. And most airlines already have these installed anyway. And if a new plane costs minimum 25 million $, and most cost 50 million $ or more, a few 1000s to safely record data seems reasonable. Bandwidth issue for a bunch of audio files? I think we can figure that out. > (3) I don't think a single person would suggest we replace the Blackbox. This would be in addition, not instead. > (4) I'm sue the plane produces lots of data that isn't transmitted. It would generally be smart to transmit far more data then we currently do and I'm not sure those methods are up to large increases. But if they are, then yes that would be good.
- dgrin91 3y ago
  For the cost - you are talking about the capex. Starlink would go under opex, and thats where the margins lie. You can probably make the numbers work, but no one wants to touch this. For bandwidth - there are typically around 10k planes in the sky at any time, and that number typically grows. Thats 10k audio files streaming at a time, all day, every day. Add to that the nominal Starlink traffic that already causes bandwidth issues and you end up with probably non-trivial bandwidth issues until there is larger scaleup
axus 3y ago
Passengers can get a decent network connection on planes these days, no need to make a totally new system. But it's best effort; I'd still want a local copy that's a separate system from the uploaded audio.

panick21_ 3y ago

There are many other system other then Starlink you could also use. And most airlines already have these installed anyway. And if a new plane costs minimum 25 million $, and most cost 50 million $ or more, a few 1000s to safely record data seems reasonable. Bandwidth issue for a bunch of audio files? I think we can figure that out. > (3) I don't think a single person would suggest we replace the Blackbox. This would be in addition, not instead. > (4) I'm sue the plane produces lots of data that isn't transmitted. It would generally be smart to transmit far more data then we currently do and I'm not sure those methods are up to large increases. But if they are, then yes that would be good.

dgrin91 3y ago
For the cost - you are talking about the capex. Starlink would go under opex, and thats where the margins lie. You can probably make the numbers work, but no one wants to touch this. For bandwidth - there are typically around 10k planes in the sky at any time, and that number typically grows. Thats 10k audio files streaming at a time, all day, every day. Add to that the nominal Starlink traffic that already causes bandwidth issues and you end up with probably non-trivial bandwidth issues until there is larger scaleup

axus 3y ago

Passengers can get a decent network connection on planes these days, no need to make a totally new system. But it's best effort; I'd still want a local copy that's a separate system from the uploaded audio.