Qatar Airways Plans To Stop Air Disasters By Live-Streaming Black Boxes From Planes

This article also aims to tribute the deaths of all passengers on flights MH370 and MH17  of Malaysia Airlines and flight QZ8501 of AirAsia.

This past year has been blighted by a spate of airline disasters around the world, including the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the shooting down of flight MH17. Nobody wants to fly at this time. And even if someone has to take a plane, he/she no longer enjoys the flight as it should be.

Although those tragedies were unfortunate, it’s time for the aviation industry to take action to increase the safety of flights. On January 12th, Qatar Airlines announced the plan for real-time streaming of data from planes in order to prevent accidents by providing faster and potentially better information to those on the ground. Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker said the corporation is working with a supplier to test “the system whereby all the flight data recorded in the black box, or the flight data recorder, is also received continuously during the flight on the ground in our operations centre”. In fact, once this technology is mainstreamed, the aviation experts will be able to track the information of flights without spending effort to find the black box (as the case study of the flight MH370 — whose black box allegedly sank deep under Indian Ocean).

Collaborating with Qatar Airways in this business is Inmarsat, whose SwiffBroadband aeronautical service supports inflight WiFi on Qatar’s Boeing 878s and now the A350. “Qatar Airways is already making an experiment with a supplier, that I’m not at liberty to tell you or from which country…but we we working very closely with them testing the system whereby all the flight data recorded in the black box, or the flight data recorder, is also received continuously during the flight on the ground in our operations centre. Once this has been proven and all the bugs have been cleared, Qatar, I hope, will be the first airline to introduce this in all of airplanes,” said Baker.

Thanks to Qatar Airways for all their efforts to make flights safer in the near future.

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