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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

#21

Post by melling »

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…

The planes are traveling 8 or 9 miles a minute. If it goes down mostly intact (i.e. not a lot of debris), there's a lot of ocean that you'll need to search. Personally, I'd feel better if the plane simply pinged its location every few seconds to a satellite so rescue teams know immediately where to look. Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?

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

#22

Post by mcintyre1994 »

curtis wrote: post #4

I think one of the lessons of Air France 447 is that our existing black boxes not only work, they work extremely well. So it's not so much that we want to replace our current black box technology so much as we want to augment it. A live satellite feed is an obvious choice here, but I'd argue that a secondary backup black-box (presumably 100% solid state these days) located in a part of the airplane that's likely to f…

Is there any part of a plane likely to float with a black box attached to it? I can't find data on Google, but I'd guess they're pretty heavy?

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

#23

Post by pcurve »

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…

In both Air France 447 and Malay Air MH370, local authorities found traces of crash / wreckage within 1-2 days.

People don't fully appreciate how difficult it is to find anything in the middle of ocean when there's no visual trace.

Even if you can narrow down the point of impact within a few square miles, you won't know for sure until you get underwater equipment. When you're dealing with deep underwater recovery, all bets are off.

I think low-tech solution would be effective. Perhaps install a few dozen chemically activated florescent devices throughout the plane that would float.

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

#24

Post by Zancarius »

WalterBright wrote: post #13

I'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.

I was hoping you'd chime in on one of these discussions, given your history in the aircraft industry.

What are your thoughts on the rather knee-jerk articles as of late that seem to think that some form of streaming technology is somehow absolutely imperative, and how might that compare to the tried-and-tested flight recorders given what we know from AF447 sharing periodic updates as to its status?

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

#25

Post by raverbashing »

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…

We can and do track aircraft through several systems: ACARS, ADS-B reading position info through GPS (and others)

Wifi and cell-phone have speed limitations (receiver transmitter), also, they are not adequate for something flying 500knots at 35kfeet

However, it is true that systems could be upgraded and offer a bigger bandwidth (within a certain limit)

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

#26

Post by crazytony »

mbell wrote: post #8

This plane, like most other commercial jets, already had ADS-B onboard which transmits quite a bit of flight data. This is where most of the data on flightradar24.com comes from. In the case of the Air France flight it was way out in the ocean away from ADS-B receivers. There is already a plan to include ADS-B receivers on more satellites to help the ocean coverage problem. None of this solves the issue of sorting ou…

Agreed. And ADS is mandated in commercial aircraft. It's part of the system that prevents aircraft from colliding with each other in the air (TCAS/ACAS).

But as I understand in this situation they were not out of ADS-B range nor were they out of radar range. While ADS-B requires the aircraft to transmit, radar does not.

An example of an in-flight breakup happened in 2002 when China Airlines 611 which broke into 4 pieces about 40km off of an island. Looking at the radar returns they found the aircraft broke into 4 large chunks and they were able to tell where items would be due to the radar tracks.

I'm really not sure what's happened here but my hunch is that the incident happened at the boundary of one or more countries' radar systems. So Malaysia needs Vietnam and/or Thailand and/or Cambodia and/or China to turn over their radar returns so that everything can be lined up correctly.

If it was all within one radar system you would have a location pinpointed within an hour.

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

#27

Post by Zancarius »

melling wrote: post #21
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…

The planes are traveling 8 or 9 miles a minute. If it goes down mostly intact (i.e. not a lot of debris), there's a lot of ocean that you'll need to search. Personally, I'd feel better if the plane simply pinged its location every few seconds to a satellite so rescue teams know immediately where to look. Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?

> Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?

Apparently 2-3 kilometers according to [1], which I found in the comments from here [2].

[1] http://www.hydro-international.com/issues/articles/id1098-Ai...

[2] http://www.aticourses.com/blog/index.php/tag/side-scan-sonar...

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

#28

Post by curtis »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #22
curtis wrote: post #4

I think one of the lessons of Air France 447 is that our existing black boxes not only work, they work extremely well. So it's not so much that we want to replace our current black box technology so much as we want to augment it. A live satellite feed is an obvious choice here, but I'd argue that a secondary backup black-box (presumably 100% solid state these days) located in a part of the airplane that's likely to f…

Is there any part of a plane likely to float with a black box attached to it? I can't find data on Google, but I'd guess they're pretty heavy?

There were certainly parts of Air France 447 that floated. I think the largest piece may have been a section of tail. I don't know if there are parts that reliably float in the case of an accident over water but I'd guess that tail sections and winglets are good candidates.

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

#29

Post by whyenot »

objclxt wrote: post #19
austinz wrote: post #2

Certainly, 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.

Then do the update every 5s. You don't even need to do a full update, just coordinates, heading, altitude and speed. Still technically feasible, still not terribly expensive (seriously, ~80 bytes every 5 seconds) yet potentially very useful since you can pinpoint an aircraft's location to within less than 1/2 mile at any point during its flight.

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

#30

Post by kalleboo »

yaakov34 wrote: post #20

Let'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:…

Satellite could just be a fallback only used when you're not over ground. This would remove the load of all US/European intra-continental flights (the vast majority).

It looks like ACARS already uses Iridium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communication_Addressi...

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