Page 25 - ITU-T Focus Group on Aviation Applications of Cloud Computing for Flight Data Monitoring - Use cases and requirements

ITU-T Focus Group on Aviation Applications of Cloud Computing for Flight Data Monitoring
Use cases and requirements

3.13 Cockpit voice recorder (CVR)

Civil aviation airliners are required to have a cockpit voice recorder on board. These devices record the cockpit
voice continuously. Latest models also store the datalink data. The data storage can hold the data of several
hours. It is organized in a ring buffer, meaning that with new data to be stored, the oldest data gets overwritten.
The voice recorder is one of the two black boxes that are recovered after an accident. The data is considered
private data and usually not fed into databases. Only for accident investigation or maintenance activities the
data gets downloaded from the device. Irrespective of the legal implications, the voice data could in the future
be transmitted in real time from the aircraft and provide highly valuable data for accident investigation.

4 Use cases

4.1 Flight tracking and search and rescue

The use case flight tracking/flight following will utilize the same parameters from aircraft data and hence are
grouped together here.

Description Collect (tamper-proof collection of flight data), analyse and store the aircraft position (lati-
tude/longitude) and possibly additional data such as altitude, speed, wind direction, wind
speed, time and heading in real time.
The task of tracking an aircraft for the purpose of determining its real-time spatial location or
post-flight track flown.

Scenario The aircraft either periodically transmits the tracking data to a server on the ground via a
communication network or periodically records the tracking data onto an on-board recorder
that can then be accessed in-flight or post-flight. The ground system stores the data to pro-
vide situational awareness.

User groups Primary user groups:
• Air traffic management;
• Airline;
• Airport ground operations;
• Contracted maintenance organizations (line maintenance).
• Secondary user groups:
• Military;
• Passengers.

15