[LINK] Flash drives in the sea?

[Stephen Loosley]

YESTERDAY, the aerial search for floating debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was called off, and an underwater search based on possible locator beacon signals was completed without success. 

Although efforts to find the missing aircraft have not been abandoned, Angus Houston, the man in charge of finding the plane, said, “We haven’t found anything anywhere.”

The more than 50-day operation, which the Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, calls “probably the most difficult search in human history,” highlights a big technology gap. We live in the age of “the Internet of Things,” where everything from cars to bathroom scales can be connected to the Internet, but somehow, airplane data systems are barely connected to anything.

Investigators discovered Flight 370’s path into the Indian Ocean using an unorthodox analysis of data from the plane’s Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or Acars, which was invented in the 1970s and is based on telex, an almost century-old ancestor of text messaging made essentially obsolete by fax machines.

The Acars aircraft system was not designed for locating planes. The black box flight data recorders that are the focus of the search for Flight 370 are little more than super-tough memory sticks with locator beacons. 

When so much is connected to the Internet, why is the aerospace industry using technology that predates fax machines to look for flash drives in the sea?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/opinion/finding-a-flash-drive-in-the-sea.html?

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Cheers,
Stephen