To find one of the most advanced airplanes in the sky, they would have to travel to one of the most primitive places on earth — and seek out one of the most archaic devices in modern aviation, a relic that has barely changed in the last half-century of flight: the black box.
“It’s ridiculous,” Peter Goelz says. “There is absolutely no reason not to have live-streaming data.” As managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board in the late 1990s, Goelz saw his share of accidents, but the disappearance of Flight 447 got under his skin. The fact that in an era of wireless technology, when passengers on some jets can surf the Internet, the most valuable information about a flight is still stored on the very airplane that has, by definition, crashed before the information is needed, did not sit well with Goelz.
“I’ve had arguments with pilots over this,” he told me. “They don’t want anyone monitoring their performance. But every 7-Eleven clerk in America has a bank of cameras on him. Why can’t pilots?”
