Could the CVR and FDR record to the cloud? Another enthusiast question. I watch a lot of the National Geographic Channel's "Air Crash Investigation", for better or worse, and it seems accident investigators make tremendous use of the Cockpit Voice Recorder "CVR" and Flight Data Recorder "FDR" to determine the chain of events leading up to- or the root cause of an accident.

One of the more recent episodes of ACI (Season 12 Ep. 13) was about Air France 447, the worst disaster in French aviation history. That investigation spent two years and $50 million just locating the CVR and FDR which were ultimately found resting 4 kilometers beneath the mid-Atlantic. Even after the recovery, there were concerns one of the drives had failed.

That ACI episode also mentioned that the Airbus A330-203 in that accident came equipped with a system which periodically transmitted maintenance data to a remote Airbus location in Paris to alert ground crews of possible maintenance issues with inbound aircraft.

Given that Airbus already uses similar technology for maintenance data (and I think I recall hearing Boeing does too), I was wondering if either Airbus, Boeing, or the FAA, plan to facilitate or mandate that the CVR and FDR record to the cloud or a remote location either in lieu of or in addition to the physical devices installed in commercial aircraft. I would think this would be an accident investigator's dream come true, with almost instant access to vital investigative information, while drastically reducing instances of going without these crucial tools when the physical devices are unrecoverable.

So, does anyone in the know have any idea if there are plans for CVR and FDR data to be transmitted and recorded to the cloud or a remote location?
The basic problem with transmitting CVR &amp; FDR data to the ground from flight is the sheer amount of data that is generated by today's sophisticated airplanes.  There are hundreds of parameters being recorded many times per second plus the voice channels.  Today's airliners record 500 GB of data on each flight.  Take this and multiply it by the thousands of airplanes that are in flight at any given moment, and you can see that there would need to be a lot of bandwidth available for all of it to be transmitted wirelessly.  There would also need to be a world-wide standard developed and hardware deployed so that an airplane can transmit the data no matter where they are.  Airplanes operating in remote locations would have to use satellites, which are relatively low speed and expensive to deploy/maintain/operate.  

In short, it just isn't practical with today's technology.