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They charge a lot of money for real-time telemetry from a plane. This charge can frequently represent the entire profit for a flight for smaller carriers, so t
by jpollock 12y ago
They charge a lot of money for real-time telemetry from a plane. This charge can frequently represent the entire profit for a flight for smaller carriers, so they don't elect to purchase it.
- rational-future 12y agoWho is 'they'? You don't even need Iridium, a shortwave radio transmitter will suffice.
- achamayou 12y agoBoeing or Airbus. Look up ACARS, it exists, many planes are equipped. I find conflicting information about the Air Asia flight, a Bloomberg article claims the plane wasn't equipped, other places claim it was, but the airline wasn't subscribing to the data it generated. It's not clear at all whether this is related to the cost of the system itself however.
- spacefight 12y agoWould it? Could you elaborate?
- ars 12y agoYou don't need real-time (a small delay is OK) or much telemetry. Just 10 bytes or so every 5-10 minutes. And over land you can use cell phone tower, so smaller carriers (who don't go much over water) would not be impacted badly. Actually over land you probably don't need anything at all, so this really would just impact those best able to handle the expense.