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Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

theguardian.com

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Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#131

Post by neurotech1 »

tobiasu wrote: post #51

Before you waste time with better data logging, please install an ejection seat, parachute, and a built-in life support system. That's much more useful than sensors that record the demise of the passengers to satisfy the bloodlust of news corps. Or rationally, don't change a damn thing. Airliners are fine. Any other form of transportation (maybe with the exception of trains) is many times more deadly and we cope with…

Remember that even escape slides can result in serious injury to around 10% of passengers during an evacuation.

Ejection Seats are deadly/extremely dangerous if the person in them is not properly trained. Body position when the seat fires can make the difference between minor scratches and death.

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#132

Post by mschuster91 »

akiselev wrote: post #53

I 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…

The "old manufacturing process" is mostly related to space radiation hardening - the smaller the structure size, the easier it is for the background radiation to cause bit flips.

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#133

Post by morcheeba »

potatolicious wrote: post #119
anigbrowl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't be dense. That's not what at all he said & your math is all wrong.

The existing black box is not a single point of failure. The big question is finding it ... that's what this whole concern has been over (and, since you missed it, why I joshingly call you dense).

Anig also clearly stated that there would be 20 of these, operating in parallel. Your math is wrong because you ignore his central argument.

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#134

Post by jccooper »

gonzo wrote: post #115
crazytony wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"By September 10, search crews had found eight previously uncharted crash sites,[54][55] some of which are decades old,[56] but none related to Fossett's disappearance."

Wow.

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#135

Post by lgeek »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #124
akiselev wrote: post #53

I 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…

Replacing black boxes is not a good idea. Black boxes work when everything else has broken. We trust them to report when unimaginable edge conditions are breached. We should instead supplement our sturdy but silent black boxes with a chattier partner. The new device would not survive a catastrophic breakup. Nor would it receive the omniscient breadth of data trusted to a black box. Instead, it would (1) receive a sub…

> We should instead supplement our sturdy but silent black boxes with a chattier partner. The new device would not survive a catastrophic breakup. Nor would it receive the omniscient breadth of data trusted to a black box. Instead, it would (1) receive a subset of flight data (e.g. location, alerts, and pilot inputs) and (2) immediately send them to a ground-based datacentre. These data would back up air traffic controllers' radars in real time.

It seems to me you've described ADS-B[0], which this plane had and which will become a requirement in US and EU soon. Looking at sites like flightradar24.com, which use ADS-B data, it would seem most airliners already use it. The only difference from your requirements is that ADS-B doesn't broadcast any information about pilot inputs.

According to records from one of the sites which use ADS-B, the signal from this plane just stopped [1]. This could have happened because of a severe failure in flight, or maybe because the plane descended below cruising altitude which happened to take it out of receiver range. In either case, it shows that the proposed scheme would be of limited use and it might not have helped in this particular case.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...

[1] I'll search for the source when I get back to my computer. It was discussed in /r/aviation.

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#136

Post by aortega »

brandon272 wrote: post #7

I'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 can track any commercial airliner on earth, but not under 5 Km of water.

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#137

Post by exodust »

rayiner wrote: post #47
brandon272 wrote: post #7

I'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.

we lose contact with the Mars Rover by design. There's a 3 hour window of communication each day. Outside of that window, the rover is on its own.

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#138

Post by crazytony »

gonzo wrote: post #115
crazytony wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He was found a year later not decades later.

To be clear though: I was talking commercial operations which generally operate above the radar plane. I'm not even sure how/if Fosset's plane would appear on radar as he had no ADS and he didn't file a flight plan which means he was in class G or possibly E airspace on a VFR mission (very low altitude).

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#139

Post by smsm42 »

akiselev wrote: post #53

I 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…

But do they really need to "operate" under these harsh conditions? They need to preserve the recorded data (which AFAIK with a suitable magnetic storage requires no processing power and no energy, just ability to stay mechanically together) and to do something to be found - like send GPS coordinates out on exceptional event and/or a loud radio ping that can be located by search teams after the crash. That shouldn't be that hard to do? Or am I missing something here?

Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes

#140

Post by anigbrowl »

potatolicious wrote: post #119
anigbrowl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No. I want to keep the existing systems and add another system that's sufficiently cheap that it it can have a 95% failure rate and still be economical.

I mean, here we are after 3 days and none of the surface vessels can find the possibly-debris stuff seen from the air earlier today. I don't have a design for a foolproof system and am under no illusions that the existing 'black boxes' could be easily replaced, but the existence of commodity-cheap sensors, processing, and communications technology mean we can afford massive redundancy.

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