The black box flight recorders from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on 8 March 2014 along with the 227 passengers and 12 crew. Just four months after this tragic debacle, another Malaysia Airlines passenger plane (flight MH17) has allegedly been shot down near the Ukraine/Russia border and the black box recorders have apparently gone missing.
Given that commercial passenger aircraft are already equipped with satellite connections, surely the airline industry must now act urgently to replace the outdated black box recorders with a system that continuously streams flight data to a central cloud-based platform, thus ensuring secure, reliable retrieval of cockpit information in the event of such disasters. These days, there is no reason why it should be so difficult for investigators to work out why an aircraft crashed. Behind every cloud there should be another cloud.
