Does anyone think this air crash investigation will be anything like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870 investigation? It also exploded over sea, pieces were found. First they thought it exploded due to a missile from a military jet. Then some engineers found out that the explosion was a bomb in a rear airplane toilet.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
11–20 of 182 posts
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#12I'm seeing a lot of armchair criticism aimed at the air travel industry about how these aircraft should be able to be tracked more effectively given "modern technology" and they reference things like broadband in cars, WiFi on flights, etc. What they seem to ignore is that many of these things only work effectively on land in populated areas. Drive your car out to the South China Sea and let me know how well the in-c…
Flightradar24 has a fantastic primer on what tech is used to track aircraft, and what it's limitations are: http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#13I'd also like to see, along with the cockpit voice data recorder, a video recorder of the last n minutes of the cockpit. Much accident investigation revolves around trying to reconstruct what the pilot was doing, looking at, etc. This would make it much simpler and more accurate.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#14I'm seeing a lot of armchair criticism aimed at the air travel industry about how these aircraft should be able to be tracked more effectively given "modern technology" and they reference things like broadband in cars, WiFi on flights, etc. What they seem to ignore is that many of these things only work effectively on land in populated areas. Drive your car out to the South China Sea and let me know how well the in-c…
There was another snippet from the article which was interesting.
> A recent patent application filed by Boeing describes such a system, which specifies a limited data set including the precise location of the aircraft and the flight control inputs by the pilot or the automation system.
Clearly, Boeing themselves are thinking towards continuous tracking of a flight.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#15I'm seeing a lot of armchair criticism aimed at the air travel industry about how these aircraft should be able to be tracked more effectively given "modern technology" and they reference things like broadband in cars, WiFi on flights, etc. What they seem to ignore is that many of these things only work effectively on land in populated areas. Drive your car out to the South China Sea and let me know how well the in-c…
Aren't satellites an obvious choice for this sort of thing? The link doesn't need to have the kind of low ping you expect for online games, and for low-latency communication they can use radio/radar - but that seems like it would have enough bandwidth for black-box style data, wouldn't it? Or does satellite communication generally suffer from problems with cloud cover, etc, even at the altitudes commercial airliners…
I pointed this out somewhere else, but satellites aren't particularly helpful because you won't be able to transmit to them when you most need it, which is when there are problems with the plane. It's still highly likely that you're still going to end up with planes going 'off the grid' so to speak.
You could lose power, stopping you from transmitting telemetric data. Or there could be a cabin depressurization or breach that cuts off the antennas (or destroys them entirely). I'm not denying there are benefits to streaming telemetric and flight data continuously for non-major mechanical failures and general analysis - but when we're talking about a catastrophic event that brings down a plane?
In such an event you're going to be sending people to look for the wreckage anyway. Whatever data you're streaming isn't going to tell you the whole story - it'll end up looking exactly like the data does today: perfectly normal, and then nothing. I can see that in a 24 hour news cycle people want to know what happened when it happened. It perhaps understandably freaks people out to learn planes can just 'disappear' without explanation. But streaming telemetric data isn't going to help with that, because the only way we can stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area) is with satellites, and they're simply not reliable enough for it to be worth anything.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#16I'm seeing a lot of armchair criticism aimed at the air travel industry about how these aircraft should be able to be tracked more effectively given "modern technology" and they reference things like broadband in cars, WiFi on flights, etc. What they seem to ignore is that many of these things only work effectively on land in populated areas. Drive your car out to the South China Sea and let me know how well the in-c…
Aren't satellites an obvious choice for this sort of thing? The link doesn't need to have the kind of low ping you expect for online games, and for low-latency communication they can use radio/radar - but that seems like it would have enough bandwidth for black-box style data, wouldn't it? Or does satellite communication generally suffer from problems with cloud cover, etc, even at the altitudes commercial airliners…
The problem is that accident events (or events leading to an accident) happen in real time, and the flight recorders record a lot of data from the flight controls and instruments. As others have pointed out in the comments for another story, what happens if their aircraft's orientation occludes the antenna or something breaks off? From what I've read of most accidents, the recorders work quite well and often continue working until cables are severed (in which case satellite communications wouldn't work either), in-flight fires consume the aircraft, etc.
Technology will unlikely replace flight records, which have a proven track record (provided they can be found... but not as many have gone missing as you might think), but it can certainly augment it. I still don't think it's as good a solution to the "real time" problem as having the recorder on board the accident aircraft itself.
Edit: Sibling comment from objclxt incidentally is the same user who illustrated the problems with satellite communications I alluded to. See objclxt's comment history for details.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#17I love how the article compares a black box to an iPhone. A flight data recorder is one of the worlds most indestructible pieces of technology, whose main function still works having been smashed into the land, undergone a fireball, or dropped to the bottom of the sea. An iPhone breaks when you drop it from three feet and becomes little more than an expensive piece of junk (as do all modern, touchscreen smartphones).…
I agree. The fact that they pulled a black box up from the bottom of the Atlantic after sitting on the bottom of the ocean for two years show how durable those things are.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't satellites an obvious choice for this sort of thing? The link doesn't need to have the kind of low ping you expect for online games, and for low-latency communication they can use radio/radar - but that seems like it would have enough bandwidth for black-box style data, wouldn't it? Or does satellite communication generally suffer from problems with cloud cover, etc, even at the altitudes commercial airliners…
I pointed this out somewhere else, but satellites aren't particularly helpful because you won't be able to transmit to them when you most need it , which is when there are problems with the plane. It's still highly likely that you're still going to end up with planes going 'off the grid' so to speak. You could lose power, stopping you from transmitting telemetric data. Or there could be a cabin depressurization or br…
> because the only way we can stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area)
I think this hits an important point that's lost in the media scuffle that inevitably ensues.
Because modern travel has made the world so much smaller, most people have a difficult time trying to fathom precisely how vast the oceans are and that we base our notion of coverage on what familiarities surround us--that is to say: land.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#19Certainly, at least for those planes fitted with satellite Internet uplinks, a status report every two minutes or so would be technically feasible and not terribly expensive?
> a status report every two minutes or so would be technically feasible and not terribly expensive?
...but also not very useful. Two minutes is a long time when you're traveling at 570 MPH - in the event of a catastrophic explosion a plane could be on a perfectly normal flight path one minute and then gone the next, and you still have a vast radius to cover when looking for the wreckage.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#20Let's start estimating the technical challenge here (we're supposed to be techies, after all).
Bandwidth: quick googling shows that a flight data recorder records between 64 and 256 12-bit words a second, i.e. 1-3 kbps. Browsing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate shows that another 2-8 kbps is needed for voice recording (from one microphone). Let's call it 10 kpbs all together.
Number of simultaneous connections: there are around 20,000 (ballpark) airliners in the air at the peak time each day.
Compare this to the rather old Iridium satellite network: 2400 (uplink) baud rate, 1100 calls simultaneously per satellite (of which there are 68). Not quite enough, since airplanes are not evenly distributed over the Earth or under the satellites, but not outrageously far from our requirements.
Cost: several billion dollars (under 10, I think) have been invested into building the Iridium network, and their operating expenses are around 100 million per year (they are a public company).
Clearly, it would not be unrealistically expensive, in the world of 500 million dollar airliners, to build and maintain a network of satellites to record all black-box voice and data in real time.