Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
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Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#2Certainly, 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?
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#3Why is this on HN? Clearly, it's not a problem that can be solved with JS or Rails.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#4I 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 float would be a good idea.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#5Certainly, 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?
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 messages, sent from an onboard monitoring system via the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), were made public on 4 June 2009.[34] The transcripts indicate that between 02:10 UTC and 02:14 UTC, 6 failure reports (FLR) and 19 warnings (WRN) were transmitted.[35] The messages resulted from equipment failure data, captured by a built-in system for testing and reporting, and cockpit warnings also posted to ACARS.[36] The failures and warnings in the 4 minutes of transmission concerned navigation, auto-flight, flight controls and cabin air-conditioning (codes beginning with 34, 22, 27 and 21, respectively).[37]
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#6I love how the article compares a black box to an iPhone.
A flight data recorder is one of the worlds most indestructible pieces of technology, whose main function still works having been smashed into the land, undergone a fireball, or dropped to the bottom of the sea.
An iPhone breaks when you drop it from three feet and becomes little more than an expensive piece of junk (as do all modern, touchscreen smartphones).
Good luck getting a satellite or cell signal a few fathoms under the sea, near no cell towers.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#7I'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-car broadband works and if you are able to send and receive an SMS using your phone.
There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. Our ability to track something is a lot easier when things are going right. When something catastrophic happens, whether to a 777 out over the ocean or a rover on Mars, suddenly tracking the objects becomes a lot more difficult.
That said, perhaps there are technological innovations that could allow us to more easily pinpoint and track black boxes from downed airliners. I'm just not sure what they are. Any ideas?
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#8This 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 out what happened during a catastrophic failure. It's likely any transmission based system will fail is such situations. The only reliable way to have real time information is to use external sources, e.g. high resolution radar covering every point on Earth, that isn't cheap nor politically easy.
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#9I'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 fly at?
Though, once the black box is in the ocean with the rest of a plane's wreckage, I can't imagine satellites would help :)
Re: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
#10Certainly, 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?
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.