Remember the Smolensk air-crash which killed President Lech Kaczynski and so many other senior Poles?

Disagreement has rumbled on about how far mistakes or misjudgements made by the Polish aircrew and/or Russian control tower were responsible, but a major Polish report has now accepted that a good slice of the responsibility is on the Polish side. The Defence Minister has resigned.

Part of the problem after any such calamity is working out the key facts: what precisely happened and why? In this case the Poles have been dismayed that, as they see it, the Russian side has not been as forthcoming as it might have been. Hence the usual conspiracy theories.

One way to improve information understanding immediately after any accident is to have vital data stored not in aircraft ‘black boxes’ but streamed in real time to different key places for storage and (as necessary) analysis. This super Wired piece describes how that might be done quite easily and fairly cheaply.

In the Smolensk case, the disagreements between Warsaw and Moscow over the causes of the accident might not have vanished had both sides had all flight data streamed to them during the flight, but the areas of disagreement perhaps would have been much reduced – and much more quickly articulated.

Real-time transparency. You can’t beat it.