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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

#31

Post by batbomb »

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?

Ejection systems are pretty advanced. A secondary black-box or just transponder that ejects in the event of rapid acceleration or altitude loss could be helpful, although the engineering of getting it into an airliner might be a bit tough.

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

#32

Post by curtis »

austinz wrote: post #10
curtis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air France 447 actually had such a system, although it was not designed to fulfill the same role as the black box. Here's Wikipedia on the subject ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Automated... ): An Air France spokesperson stated on 3 June that "the aircraft sent a series of electronic messages over a three-minute period, which represented about a minute of information. "[32][33][Note 2] These mes…

Interesting. From the linked article, it looks like coordinate data was transmitted as well as telemetry. Given the high speed of airliners, ocean currents, and travel time for rescue ships, even minute-by-minute transmissions wouldn't solve the problem of pinpointing the exact location of wreckage/survivors.

In the case of AF447 the flight control system knew something was wrong. In a situation like that increasing the rate of messaging automatically might be a good idea, and could probably be implemented entirely in software. It probably wouldn't help in the case of catastrophic air frame failure out altitude however.

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

#33

Post by mcintyre1994 »

curtis wrote: post #28
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was thinking about the added weight of a black box though. My possibly naive assumption is that they're heavy because they're so robust, so would need serious buoyancy. I can't find a weight for them though so I might be wrong.

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

#34

Post by m4x »

objclxt wrote: post #15
kevingadd wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

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 flight was for somebody to point out that the plane was stalling due to a bad control input by one of the pilots.

There are certainly cases where the telemetry link would fail as the aircraft ran into trouble, rendering it useless, but there are undeniably cases where it could save hundreds of lives

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

#35

Post by yeukhon »

pcurve wrote: post #23
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, al…

Yes. It took two years and multiple teams (including submarine) until Titanic team came and found the blackbox and the remains of the aircraft deep on the seabed.

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

#36

Post by rjzzleep »

what yakov says isn't fully accurate. there are 4 voice channels that sum up to around 50kbit. and the fdr recording data is specified at around 12kbit. check the bea working group document

ironically part of my master thesis is about blackboxes and satellites. iridium has been working with some company about the topic(i think, i wish i remembered the details, but you can just google them). but generally iridium is slow right now(that might change but when i say slow i mean less than 4kbit slow), and i think the main reason why it's still there is because it covers the poles.

rolls royce actually already deployed a thing that transfers data through satellites, so you can actually get live engine data. this is almost ironic since their engines seem to be so crappy that a significant portion of them requires replacement according to qantas.

inmarsat on the other hand is much faster. you have to consider though, in a lot of regions you have way more planes than you have bandwidth. also inmarsat is already heavily used by ships(which from what i heard have a lot of virus infested windows pc's sending bogus junk). there is no way

the main issue is that we can easily have way more planes than we have bandwidth per spot beam

[] http://www.bea.aero/en/enquetes/flight.af.447/flight.data.re...

[] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10...

[] http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/mon...

[] http://www.inmarsat.com/about-us/our-satellites/

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

#37

Post by dap »

What's the actual problem here? How many fatal crashes of commercial airliners with black boxes have ultimately not been root-caused? I don't think it's very many. Is the problem that it doesn't happen quickly enough? Is the fear that another plane might crash for the same cause while people are still investigating the first one? I'm not sure this is based on anything rational.

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

#38

Post by curtis »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #33
curtis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was thinking about the added weight of a black box though. My possibly naive assumption is that they're heavy because they're so robust, so would need serious buoyancy. I can't find a weight for them though so I might be wrong.

That may be true of existing black boxes, but a purpose-designed solid-state black box wouldn't have to be very big. Especially if it was optimized for surviving impact with water rather than, for example, a mountain.

In fact, I was just thinking about how you could probably put a miniature blackbox in every single airline seat. Airline seats are already designed to float, and you'd only need one of them to be recoverable. Such a black box might not be capable of storing everything traditional black boxes do, but if it managed to capture a last moment GPS position it might make it much easier to find the regular black box.

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

#39

Post by melling »

Zancarius wrote: post #27
melling wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

So, if the plane is traveling at 13 km a minutes and you have a 20 minute window, it's going to take a long time to find it.

Doesn't the technology exist to detect low power signals from a much greater distance? The US military must be able to do it?

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

#40

Post by yeukhon »

dap wrote: post #37

What's the actual problem here? How many fatal crashes of commercial airliners with black boxes have ultimately not been root-caused? I don't think it's very many. Is the problem that it doesn't happen quickly enough? Is the fear that another plane might crash for the same cause while people are still investigating the first one? I'm not sure this is based on anything rational.

How many fatal crashes of commercial airliners with black boxes have ultimately not been root-caused?

I am not sure what you are trying to say.

The blackbox is like your log file on a server: the flight recorders (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) in aircraft, (wiki). So if you want to know what happened to the aircraft, whether after a fatal crash or after a hijack or after emergency landing, the blackbox is ultimately the best source. Don't forget there is a legal responsibility.

It is totally rational.

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