If you're moderately interested in technology and travel by air, you've probably heard news of in-flight broadband access.

Rather than being yet another amenity for the business traveler to stay productive or for people to keep in touch or to keep entertained on long flights, in-air broadband is something the FAA should consider making standard on all new aircraft.

No, I don't think the FAA has a vested interest in making sure that the tween in seat 16C can download the latest single from Hannah Montana in-flight. Rather, I think the airline industry, as well as the regulatory body overseeing it, should make in-flight broadband a requirement for safety and maintenance reasons.

From the maintenance perspective, airplanes either should already be (or if not, could be required to be) equipped with on-board diagnostics. This is something the car in your garage or driveway already has. Called ODBII (On-Board Diagnostics 2) your car's engine can diagnose and warn about several kinds of problems that your car might encounter from the air/fuel mix, to the ignition and exhaust. If you've ever seen a "Check Engine Light", you know what I'm talking about.

Now, clearly, airplanes could "store" these codes, much like your car does. And much like you can take your car into the dealership to have the codes pulled to identify what the maintenance issue is, airplanes can be checked at the terminal for their operational status.

Or, alternatively, these codes could be beamed, in-flight, to a central maintenance facility who can dispatch the proper parts and mechanics to meet the plane at the most optimal location in its itinerary.

My personal philosophy when it comes to maintaining my own vehicle is to address each issue as soon as it comes up, when the cost of addressing it is minimal. Issues ignored typically equals issues magnified and made more expensive in my world view. If this belief holds true in the real world, then real ROI can be shown here by airlines voluntarily including broadband and using that pipe to stream such diagnostic signals.

Consider if there were tire pressure monitoring systems, like in modern luxury vehicles, that could alert about lower tire pressures, in-flight. Forget the sensational scenario of averting a safety danger (although this, too, could be a benefit), but just consider the alternative of having a flight land and return to the terminal. The post-flight check, or possibly the pre-flight check of the next flight might detect the low tire pressure on the aircraft. Meanwhile you're boarding 200+ people on the plane, and the plane needs to reach its next destination with little room for error to not cascade delays everywhere on its itinerary.

Clearly, having advance notice of the problem means that you can have the air pump or tire replacement equipment ready at the gate when the plane lands. True, if the airplane is so instrumented, the pilot can alert the ground crew too when the light switches on in the cockpit, but why add the human element in the middle who might be busy with other details?

The other aspect of my argument is illustrated by Air France 447. The diagnostic stream of data is useful in maintenance, but the FAA could really benefit from live streams of black box flight data streamed in-flight. Rather than having to hunt for the black box, what if all the black box data was already available? In situations where the black box may not be able to be recovered (reports put the 447 flight recorder as deep as 13K feet), or if the data on it is damaged, voice and telematics data could be encoded, compressed and transmitted to ground-based stations that can provide either up-to-the-minute data of what was going on in the aircraft.

Depending on the speed of the in-flight broadband, this data stream could obviate the need to find the black box entirely, or at least begin to offer investigators some early data to help rule out various scenarios which might aid in either finding survivors, victims, or wreckage, not to mention answers as to what happened to prevent similar problems on similar aircraft flying hundreds of thousands of miles each day.

The question then becomes, if the FAA and airlines are constantly streaming that much data from the aircraft, how much would be left for passengers? On its face, that's a bit of a silly question... safety and cost savings would seem to have greater value than a few folks squeezing some productivity out of a flight, but I would suspect that there would be sufficient bandwidth if the FAA's requirements for black box data was of MP3 audio quality for cockpit recordings and time-limited telematics (i.e. ten data points per second as opposed to 1 data point per ms, for example). Given that it would seem to be a quantum leap in benefit beyond the basic data that is currently sent via radio, even these modest improvements, I suspect, would offer substantial benefits.