51–60 of 182 posts
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 that risk just fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 recove…
I think that's a distinction without difference. At 500mph, the water might as well be rock.
"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 ground going 100's of meters per second. The design constraints in those conditions include, assuming the plane is now a ballistic fire ball smashing into the ocean: operating temperature well above even industrial components to survive the fire, mechanical strength to withstand hundreds if not thousands of g's during impact (at this speed the ocean is the same as solid rock), and then float in the freezing ocean for days if not weeks until it is recovered. I'm not sure if black boxes are guaranteed to float or not, but if they are designed to sink, they must then withstand tens of atmospheres extra pressure for a sustained period of time.
The secret is that smartphone processors have been more powerful than safety critical processors since their inception with the IBM Simon [1]. The RAD750 [2], NASA's only "current generation" processor, began to fly in 2005 with a whopping single core with a 110Mhz core clock and an older manufacturing process than that of processors used for early 2000's era smart phones. When technology is moving so fast that Intel is building a new multi-billion dollar factory every few years, safety critical device designers don't give a shit about how fast they are. They care that they can get a level of confidence in the stability and reliability of the processor, that it has years of data on life time, and then that it can be manufactured by an array of suppliers. That cannot be guaranteed by cutting edge technology, no matter how many bits or fancy virtualization features you throw at it. For the black box, this means every component in the design must survive and operate (an IC can survive the hundreds of deg C in a reflow oven but it sure as hell won't work if you send current through it) at or close to those conditions.
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:…
Part of the reason Iridium needs a lot of satellites is because they're in low earth orbit, to reduce latencies (800km instead of 42000km for geostationary orbits means round trip latency of 5ms instead of 280ms). You might be able to lower costs by tolerating increased latency and using higher orbits. You'd still need something for pole coverage, of course.
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 blac…
Given how much these planes cost it does seem reasonable to have real time telemetry. Yes it is hard. Yes it is expensive. But no where do I read it can't be done. In fact I think a lot of technological innovation has been driven by people saying "Nope...you can't do that.".
Where is the incentive to provide real time telemetry? More crashes? This is one place where I feel the FAA does have quite a bit of responsibility.
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…
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…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation
Beam up some coordinates every minute from an Iridium phone strapped to the roof. Pair it to an iPad to get those coordinates.
Maybe have a second phone/ipad strapped onto the underside too just in case the plane ends up flying upside down.
As to the first objection, any catastrophe would be preceded by the cause of the catastrophe. This is what one would hope to capture. I'm not sure if that covers every possible case but I it could be of great value to have instant access to events just prior. As to the second objection, intelligent systems can make useful decisions about which data to transmit and about how long a burst of information should be sent.
Anything that can be done to reduce the time needed to locate passengers who are injured or trying to survive on the ocean or in difficult conditions deserves a look, in my opinon.
How many planes go down each year? A few. How many planes are never found (black boxes). One per 10-15 years?
An airline, or a company that builds planes would have little to none problem explaining to the judge that benefit-cost analyse make no sense: too much money would be spent for too little benefit (I know lives may be at stake, but that won't convince the judge).
Couple years ago I read an interesting article about the way Boeing builds their wings and the way petrol compartments are organized inside such a wing. It went on to explain that in particular external conditions of air, at particular speeds, with particular climbing angle and with particular temperature of aircraft coat, there is a chance of petrol ignition. The only "problem" is that according to their calculation, the probability of all conditions being right is 1:17,000,000. While re-engineering the wing and then applying changes to each aircraft would go north of a billion dollars. Therefore, they have not upgraded their aircrafts and no authority went after them surely because of tiny chance of an accident occurring.
We are all flying a ticking time bomb to some extent. The chances of something going wrong are comparable to putting a parrot before your keyboard. How much time will it take a parrot to hit a combination of keys writing "parrot". It may be one billion years! Or five minutes...
There is already a perfectly capable technology in place: the 406 MHz ELT. If it turns out the the (probably two) ELTs did not transmit, we need to think about why.
Things can go bad quickly on a commercial jet. No one has time to manually activate the ELT before a sudden impact.
At least one of the ELTs is required to activate automatically in case of an impact. A hard landing is enough.
So why did at least one of the ELTs not activate? here are some possibilities:
1) It did, and we don't know about it. The media is so ignorant about the details of technological systems that they don't know the questions to ask, cannot understand the relevance of technical details, and would not understand the answers in any case. Welcome to the idiocracy.
2) An ELT activated, but was not picked up. Very unlikely. If an ELT activated aboard MH370, the satellites would almost certainly have received the signal and passed it on.
3) The aircraft hit the water intact, and the ELTs were destroyed before they could activate.
We can't do anything about the stupidity of the media except to educate ourselves, stop consuming media garbage, and hope that, eventually, the human condition will improve.
If option (3) is correct, then we can also do nothing. Any force sufficient to interfere with the safe operation of the aircraft by competent pilots should also have been sufficient to activate an ELT.
If the ELT did not activate, it means that the aircraft was flyable. We cannot adjust the sensitivity of the ELTs to activate on flyable aircraft, because the rate of false activations would be unacceptable.
Apparently, we also cannot eliminate the impact of flyable aircraft with terrain by pilot training; quite the contrary--the phenomenon seems to be increasing.
Improved autopilots are also not the answer. Of necessity, an autopilot must relinquish control to human pilots in many circumstances where anomalous data is received. This is the circumstance in which it is most likely that the human pilot, taking control of a partially disabled aircraft, often at night and over water, will crash a flyable aircraft into terrain. There has been a growing series of such accidents.
So, no, we do not need to rethink "black boxes". They do their job very well. We also do not need to rethink the ELT--it is a very reliable technology except when people crash a flyable aircraft.
We may want to continue to upgrade the packet data rate between the aircraft and its base, but that is already the plan.
We also cannot upgrade the autopilot, because we cannot yet create artificial intelligence that can deal with a chaotic system like a partially disabled aircraft.
We may want to think about giving pilots better ways of seeing an overview of their situation. Mandatory AOA indicators and external-view situation indicators would be a great start.
Probably also rethinking reflexive media coverage of aviation would be good. Our need to know immediately does not trump the well-thought-out engineering of commercial airliners, and pandering to our self-absorbed search for meaning and quick fixes, particularly when none is available, is likely degrade, rather than improve, the human condition.