Earlier quoted context omitted.
With full duplex communication you can.
How would that work?
When the aircraft stops receiving signal from the ground on one channel, it searches for a beacon on another channel.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
111–120 of 182 posts
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#112Whenever there's a big disaster, people want to find technical solutions. But the real problem is not even plane crashes at all. It's car crashes, heart attacks, suicides, murders, and other preventable disasters that aren't so newsworthy but can still be helped. We all know air travel is much safer than walking or driving and also expensive, partly to pay for that extreme safety. Adding more expense to make such a safe thing even safer is wasting money.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#113I totally agree with making black boxes more advanced to phone home and such, but this line annoyed me: "Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the cockpit. Simple changes could mean faster answers for plane crashes" You're talking about the black box for a airline jet. This thing is supposed to survive plane crashes; not just being dropped a meter off the floor, but smashing into the…
Exactly. Safety-critical applications by nature have to be risk-averse, and that means anything new, anything that hasn't been thoroughly tested and backed by years of experience, is an unacceptable risk.
Older processors constructed on older large-size processes and often operating at higher voltages and slower clocks are more robust because they have a smaller number of transistors, which means a simpler more predictable model of error propagation; larger features mean lower current densities, increasing resistance to electromigration and decreasing the chances of defects from natural process variation; higher supply voltages reduce the effects of noise; slower clock rates allow more time for noise-induced glitches to settle instead of propagating.
One of my favourite examples of this is the CDP1802 - an 8-bit CPU from the mid 70s, which is still in production and use today in aerospace applications.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's difficult even on land. I recall an accident that involved a twin engine light aircraft that vanished in the middle of the night in Alaska perhaps 20 years ago. Search parties searched for quite some time, but gave up. Five years later, the plane was found in the woods some 100 meters away from a fairly frequently traveled two-lane road.
Forget Alaska, there are crashes in Nevada which haven't been found after decades. A large airliner would be easier to find on land though - just look for the glow.
Aside from Alaska (which has some radar limitations due to the terrain) I'm pretty sure none of those accidents occurred after coast-to-coast radar coverage came in to force in the continental US.
Believe it or not until 1973! there were massive land-based lighthouses all across the United States that would illuminate the aerial pathways that aircraft would use to get across the United States.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forget Alaska, there are crashes in Nevada which haven't been found after decades. A large airliner would be easier to find on land though - just look for the glow.
Aside from Alaska (which has some radar limitations due to the terrain) I'm pretty sure none of those accidents occurred after coast-to-coast radar coverage came in to force in the continental US. Believe it or not until 1973! there were massive land-based lighthouses all across the United States that would illuminate the aerial pathways that aircraft would use to get across the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org…
Steve Fossett died in 2007, flying just outside NV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett#Death
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Real time telemetry via satellite could definitely be useful in some situations. The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it. That was one of the worst crashes in history and there was never even a problem with the plane. All they needed to save the…
> The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it There are something like 10k commercial flights in the air at a given time around the world. How would that somebody on the ground know to look at that particular plane's telemetry?
There are millions of web page changes on the Internet every day. How would a Google engineer know to look at one particular page to update the index?
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#117I'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 an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. We have billions of dollars of equipment focused on tracking that rover, and we still lose contact with it sometimes.
Billions, really? Excluding the equipment used to send the rover to Mars?
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#118It truly is shame that the aviation industry keeps itself at a pace of in ovation once a decade.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#119I totally agree with making black boxes more advanced to phone home and such, but this line annoyed me: "Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the cockpit. Simple changes could mean faster answers for plane crashes" You're talking about the black box for a airline jet. This thing is supposed to survive plane crashes; not just being dropped a meter off the floor, but smashing into the…
All this is true, but perhaps we should also be exploiting cheap and redundant systems that leverage more up-to-date technology, eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd find in a typical satellite smartphone, and a small parachute - something you could build with a unit cost under $5k, which you could…
> "eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd find in a typical satellite smartphone, and a small parachute"
So you've replaced a single point of failure (failure of the recording device) with 4: failure of the ejection trigger, failure of the ejection mechanism, failure of the parachute, and failure of the (significantly weaker) recording device.
The point of a black box is that it's an when all else has failed device - there are extremely few assumptions you can make about such a situation, so the correct move is to design as conservatively as possible. The plane could be gliding. It could be a raging fireball. It could be missing a wing. It could be about to crash but all the sensors still think everything is just great.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#120The solution is streaming the data at all times. The idea of a black box is an antiquity - something used as a backup to the stream, perhaps.
Hold on while I go patent the shit out of this (yeah right, fuck the USPTO if they approve something so obvious).