Normally the unit records many critical events and signals from an airplane while in flight. In the event of an accident, the box is retreived and examined to determine what went wrong.

It is too bad that we can't find a way to transmit that information to one or more satellites or ground stations. I know there is lots of data and the black box is the current best way to house all that data; however the space shuttle doesn't use one. It relies upon a downlink for the data.

There may be 5,000 or perhaps upwards to 10,000 planes in the air at any time and that would be tremendous amounts of data.

We may not be able to capture this data in realtime, but it would make it easier to analyze if we did not have to search for the black box.