Paris  - European aircraft manufacturer Airbus is looking to replace the black boxes that currently record a plane's vital flight data with a more secure system, company head Thomas Enders said in an interview published Friday .

"To further improve aviation security in the future, we must be sure that we can retrieve all the data in case of an accident," Enders told the daily Le Parisien.

"For example, the most important flight data could be transmitted in real time via satellite, as is currently the case with information related to aircraft maintenance," he said.

Enders said Airbus was already working on the issue with its partners and suppliers.

However, when Airbus first raised the possibility of real-time data transmission, in early July, pilots protested, saying that it constituted an infringement on their privacy.

The reason for the reconsideration of the system is the inability by searchers to recover the black boxes from the Air France Airbus A330 that crashed in the Atlantic on June 1, killing 228 people.

The black boxes - a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder - contain data vital to determining what has caused an aircraft to crash.

The wreck of the Air France plane and its two boxes are believed to be lying in a mountainous region of the seafloor, which makes locating them difficult.

Enders told the daily that Airbus was prepared to "provide significant financial support" for the new stage of the search for the wreck and the black boxes, which is set to begin in the coming weeks. (dpa)