New Delhi, June 18 -- Expertise is a wonderful thing that allows an expert to achieve what a non-expert cannot. At the same time, it can also be a bane, obscuring new avenues of excellence in the expert's own area of specialization that seem visible from afar.

It is in this light that some thinking aloud ought to be done on why a few obvious digital technologies have not fully been put to use in civil aviation. One field of concern relates to the flight-data and cockpit voice recorders that commercial aircraft carry. The contents of these 'black boxes' are analysed by air-safety experts to identify the causes of an aviation mishap. To ease recovery in case of a crash, they are typically stored in the tail section of a plane that's consid...