Qatar Airways Plans to Live Stream Flight Data from Black Box Recorders
Qatar Airways wants to be the first airline to stream flight data from black boxes to operations centers on the ground in real-time, so that rescue crews won't miss a beat in the event of a disturbance during flight. Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker said a new flight tracking system was currently being tested in preparation for a fleet-wide deployment, Bloomberg reports. The push for the new system comes in the wake of disappearances last year of Malaysia Airlines and AirAsia flights, which prompted frenzied searches for black box data, which can record vital clues about the plane's location and flight conditions before it went down. Indonesian divers retrieved black boxes from missing Air Asia Flight QZ8501 Sunday, after the plane with 162 passengers crashed into the Java Sea. "Once this has been proven and all the bugs have been cleared then Qatar Airways will, I hope, be the first airliner to introduce this in all our planes," Baker said. Read more at Bloomberg.