Airbus Executive Vice-President (Engineering) Charles Champion added that such a black box system was “technically feasible” as it was already being employed by certain military planes.
The big but is that regulators are concerned about the black boxes being fired off inadvertently and causing damage on the ground.
In the wake of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 going missing on 8 March 2014, during a routine Kuala Lumpur to Beijing flight, the airline industry has been looking at various other options allowing mandatory devices.
Basically, they don’t want to lose track of a plane. They want to be able to monitor it from take-off to landing.
That’s where live data streaming comes in as another option to consider. Live data streaming would make investigators less dependent on black boxes, especially if a plane was lost at sea.
Champion conceded that the biggest hurdle with live data transmission was the bandwith costs.
“We are talking to the airlines,” he said.
He made the disclosure at an engineering briefing in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday, as the futile search for MH370 draws to an end this month in the southern Indian Ocean off southeastern Australia.
The search team engaged in the hunt for MH370, which had 239 people on board, has yet to recover the black box.
No one knows what made the plane deviate from its flight path, just short of Vietnam, turn back and go across the peninsula before heading over Pulau Perak in the Straits of Malacca, then reportedly looping around the northern tip of Sumatra, before apparently heading for a watery grave in the southern Indian Ocean.
At least nine MH370-related debris have been found in recent weeks, washed up on beaches along the western Indian Ocean. The Australians leading the hunt in the southern Indian Ocean claim that the debris finding fits in with the drift pattern experienced in the area.
Two independent studies have since suggested that MH370 went down in the northern Indian Ocean. India previously ruled out MH370 being in the Bay of Bengal. Several witnesses have claimed that a plane, in the Malaysia Airlines colours, may have gone down in flames on 8 March 2014 in the waters off the Maldives, south of Sri Lanka.
Investigators have also yet to find the cockpit voice and flight data recorder of EgyptAir Flight 804, lost over the Mediterranean Sea on May 19, on its return leg from Paris to Cairo. The devices are said to lie at depths of more than 3,000 metres (9,850 feet).