The airline industry has promised the delivery of a new ‘black box’ by the end of the year.

Industry bosses have made a pledge to agree standards for quicker data recovery to aid air crash investigators in their determinations of air accident causes.

Iata’s (the aviation industry’s trade body) Head of Safety, Gilberto Lopez Meyer, has promised that the industry is to finalise a concrete and definitive decision by the end of the year on a technology that will quicken the speed of data recovery.

Two weeks on from the Egypt Air MS804 flight crash in which all 66 people on board lost their lives, air crash investigators say they have now identified the black boxes that detail the aircraft’s last moments as well as the actions taken by the flight crew.

Yet, one airline executive said that it could still take a number of weeks before voice and data recorders are recovered from the Mediterranean, all dependant on their exact location.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation said in March that going forward all airlines will have to equip new aircraft with black box technology by January 2021.

However, it did not specifically outline the exact technology it requires the industry to use, stating only that with this solution we should see better results.

Mr Lopez said at Iata’s annual meeting in Dublin that the issue is a complex one due to the ever-changing technology that is available.

Among the options open to the aviation industry are live data streaming, which may fulfil the requirements without the need of a data recorder. However, due to such a large daily volume of flights, there is not yet sufficient infrastructure to absorb the high data volumes that would come as a result.

Iata General Director, Tony Tyler, said that the problems of broadband capacity and spectrum are still proving difficult to resolve.