Why Are We Spending Billions and Tons of Fossil Fuel On Search of Lost Planes? 343
Reader Max_W asks: After days of massive search finally, "Report: Signals detected from EgyptAir Flight 804 in Mediterranean"
Why not record GPS/GLONASS track constantly into a text file on say twenty flash USB drives enclosed into orange styrofoam with the serial aircraft number on it? In case of an accident, these waterproof USB flash drives are released outside overboard. Certainly the text file is encrypted.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp; while an aircraft costs millions, and a search may costs billions let alone thousands of tons of burned fossil fuel.
Why not record GPS/GLONASS track constantly into a text file on say twenty flash USB drives enclosed into orange styrofoam with the serial aircraft number on it? In case of an accident, these waterproof USB flash drives are released outside overboard. Certainly the text file is encrypted.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp; while an aircraft costs millions, and a search may costs billions let alone thousands of tons of burned fossil fuel.
Sure. (Score:5, Informative)
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No fucking kidding. As it is they knew where the Egypt Air plane went down within a reasonably tight geographical area, since it was on radar until it plummeted and disappeared.
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We spend that money looking for survivors. Believe it or not people do survive plane crashes. I find it hard to believe the original poster didn't think of this. I have to question his thinking on this.
"Oh another plane went down. There might be survivors but fuck'em. We don't need to be wasting fuel looking for them."
Anther reason is we want to know why the plane crashed. Was it pilot error, terrorism, or some thing wrong with the design of the plane. If there is a flaw in the plane, we need
Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floating.. (Score:5, Informative)
I've never had trouble finding a 747 that I left laying around the house. USB drives, on the other hand -- I lose those son of a bitches all the damn time.
The submitter seems to think that a 2 inch USB drive will be easier to find than a 200 foot airplane.
On the other hand, the suggestion of a FLOATING auxiliary black box has been made seriously and isn't ridiculous. A challenge is that the device must reliably leave the airplane in case of a crash, but not be knocked loss by flying at 680MPH, or be dislodged by a rough landing at an airport.
Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin (Score:5, Interesting)
How about keeping the system as is, but provide a secondary "black box" which contains a duplicate record. Any flight staff would be able to hit a button (placed in several different areas throughout the plane) to eject the secondary black box in the event that they knew they were in trouble.
The secondary black box would have a GPS tracking system, floatation, etc etc
If they accidentally eject it... oh well, not THAT big of a deal and we still have the primary system.
Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin (Score:5, Interesting)
How about non-stop streaming the info?
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On the other hand, the suggestion of a FLOATING auxiliary black box has been made seriously and isn't ridiculous. A challenge is that the device must reliably leave the airplane in case of a crash, but not be knocked loss by flying at 680MPH, or be dislodged by a rough landing at an airport.
From what I've seen of airplanes hitting the water at full tilt, getting things to leave them isn't really all that difficult. But, why not take it a step further and design a mechanism to jettison a copy of the black box data and a locator beacon before impact? Say at about 500 ft above ground/water level while on a downward slope at any location not in the vicinity of an airport, per onboard GPS, or immediately upon 'X' G's outside of a survivable impact (rough landing).
Depends on if Sullenberger is flying (Score:3)
> From what I've seen of airplanes hitting the water at full tilt, getting things to leave them isn't really all that difficult.
Sometimes. Other times it's gentler than the average landing at O'Hare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
> Say at about 500 ft above ground/water level while on a downward slope at any location not in the vicinity of an airport
Typically, at 500 feet, an landing airliner will be about a mile and half from one end of the runway, about three miles from the center of the airport.
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Typically, at 500 feet, an landing airliner will be about a mile and half from one end of the runway, about three miles from the center of the airport. So we might say you're not "near an airport" if you're least six miles from the center of an airport; sound about right? At the moment, there are two commercial airports within six miles of me, and at least two private airfields. At the last place I lived, in another town, there were also two airports within six miles. That's about typical - probably most places in the US have a commercial airport or two within six miles, and a couple of private airfields.
By not near an airport, I was thinking more like 20+ miles. If a plane crashes within that distance, there's a very good chance the tower or someone else on the ground nearby will be able to spot it visually. If a flight is at 500ft 20+ miles out, something is not going well. Even if it doesn't wind up crashing, the cost of dumping the beacon is minimal compared to the search and rescue costs trying to find it if it does. Activating the beacon immediately upon the event of a crash at any distance would cut
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Not that it can't be done, it's just non-trivial.
I think you're going to find that that's always the case when someone thinks they can solve any serious real world problem with an afterthought in a forum comment box.
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They make them. They're called depl [youtube.com]
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Airbus is on board with equipping them, Boeing less so. Boeing's concern centers around accidental deployment - they estimate that there will be 6 or 7 deployments per year.
An understandable concern, especially since accidental deployment may well happen on a runway, where FOD [wikipedia.org] is a real risk to other aircraft, as testified by the fate of flight AF4590 [wikipedia.org].
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Water soluble glue?
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Attach it underneath the wing.
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680MPH - rain comes from straight ahead (Score:2)
> Attach it underneath the wing.
Because rain falls from above? A rain drop does fall on your head from above, at about 20 MPH. Meanwhile, the aircraft is running into the rain drops at 680 MPH. The rain doesn't fall on to the aircraft, the aircraft rams into the rain drops. The rain comes from straight ahead. And with 680 MPH relative wind, the water is blown across the full surface of the aircraft.
Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin (Score:4, Funny)
If only the Boeing engineers were as smart as you guys....and knew as much about air pressure and stuff like that.
Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you could just report back your geographic coordinates via satellite communications every five minutes or so. This could be done by a low power battery backed up transmitter that would continue to run (at very low wattage) even when the fuse is pulled. Breitling makes a watch that transmits your GPS position via satellite, so we're not talking about doing something that requires massive li-ion batteries here. It could run off a very safe, current-limited NiMH battery pack that is vanishingly unlikely to cause a fire. The key is that nobody on board can stop the aircraft's position from being reported.
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The key is that nobody on board can stop the aircraft's position from being reported.
Other than by tripping the circuit breaker.
You do NOT want to have an electrical device on an aircraft that does not have a way of being unpowered when something shorts out and draws lots of current.
But yes, basically, all this talk about floating USB sticks being ejected from a crashing airplane is just nonsense. If you can't find the large bits of debris from the airplane itself, you aren't going to find small stuff. And if the airplane is on fire before ejecting the USB sticks, they can burn.
Continuo
Re:Sure. (Score:5, Funny)
Then we can spend all that fuel looking for a piece of floating garbage.
But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport? I figure if we're going to ask hypothetical questions, why not really go off the deep end?
Re:Sure. (Score:5, Funny)
But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport?
And what if we also outfitted the turtle with a strobe light, and then hired Aquaman to search for the turtles?
BRB, on my way to the patent office!
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That is marked as funny, but a robotic "turtle" that receives GPS coordinates and can swim to show would be a creative solution.
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But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport?
Have you considered a two-stage system with a turtle for the sea leg and a dog for the land leg? Surely that would be speedier. Not all airports are on the beach.
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The dog will just get hit by a car.
The only solution is for it to fly like a bird or a plane or something.
Re:Sure. (Score:5, Funny)
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At that point you may as well just use homing pigeons. And bonus: if you can keep them excited enough to fly around their cages while the plane is in flight, you reduce the weight you have to carry. The turtles and dogs are deadweight until the plane hits water, after all.
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No, you won't reduce the weight. The flapping wings will decrease the pressure above them and increase the pressure below them. These pressure differences, when integrated over the surface area of the enclosed air space and averaged over the entire time the pigeon is flying, will exactly equal the weight of the pigeon.
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Homing pigeons (Score:2)
But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport?
Homing pigeons would me much faster... And we could use them as pets inside the cabin :)
Once in trouble you just open the window and set the pigeons free... What could possibly go wrong...
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But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport?
Or sharks [xkcd.com]
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Exactly. If the problem is that we don't know where the plane crashed and are looking for it, then adding one more piece of debris at the crash site isn't going to do us any good at all. Similarly, if the problem is that we don't know where the plane came to rest at the bottom of the sea and we're hoping that this thing can float up afterwards and tell us, then we've gotten our hopes up for nothing, since GPS signals don't penetrate very far through water, meaning that the data would be useless garbage.
A be
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A very light item, packed in a very light container... yeah, that's not going to be dramatically affected by wind (if the plane breaks up at 37K feet) or currents (if the plane breaks up when it hits the water).
And it's a good thing the world's oceans are pristine, making it easy to find one tiny floating piece of cruft.
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So clearly what we need is every single part of every single plane to have a label or barcode on it. Then they would be unmistakable!
It's called a black box (Score:5, Informative)
"Why not record GPS/GLONASS track constantly into a text file on say twenty flash USB drives enclosed into orange styrofoam with the serial aircraft number on it? In case of an accident, these waterproof USB flash drives are released outside overboard. Certainly the text file is encrypted.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp; while an aircraft costs millions, and a search may costs billions let alone thousands of tons of burned fossil fuel."
Congrats, you just reinvented a black box and they don't always surface or float based on impact, depth of water, if it's caught in something or the blame hit with such violence that there wasn't much left.
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LOL @ Myself.. "the blame hit with such violence that there wasn't much left."
I mean to say plane
Re:It's called a black box (Score:5, Insightful)
I have serious doubts those USB drives will be capable of surviving the temperatures of a fire or the kinetic impact these kinds of crashes tend to experience. All the components in a blackbox are more hardened than your average walmart toys.
They don't design these devices for giggles. Everything you've thought about has been taken into consideration already by multiple people, possibly people with degrees of some sort.
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Is there currently TWENTY black boxes on a plane?
Also, I don't see the point of encrypting the information on those flash drives. Either they're in the plane and have the same type of information as all the other systems already have, or they're floating on the ocean so that people can find them to help find a missing plane.
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Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp
^ Says the person who doesn't know anything about what it costs to install equipment to an airliner...
It would probably add $50,000 to the price of each airplane, for something so rarely used...
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Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp
^ Says the person who doesn't know anything about what it costs to install equipment to an airliner...
It would probably add $50,000 to the price of each airplane, for something so rarely used...
Just a ballpark figure: $200 for gps, $200 for 2 way satphone, $200 for hardened case, $200 for 30 day battery, and $200 for long range antenna and everything else I forgot. So that's about $1000 per unit. For 20 of them we are up to 20k and I seriously doubt you can get all that for the prices I quoted. This doesn't include installation, maintenance, or the added weight of having 20 primitive black boxes on every airplane. As far as an inert object like a usb drive, I think the OP doesn't realize how
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Just a ballpark figure: $200 for gps, $200 for 2 way satphone, $200 for hardened case, $200 for 30 day battery, and $200 for long range antenna and everything else I forgot.
That isn't how it works...
Nothing can be attached to an aircraft for that little...
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You clearly have no idea just how expensive electronics certified for aviation use are. You can't just take the $200 Garmin you can buy on amazon and use it in an aircraft. The cheapest GPS unit I've been able to find (Admittedly in just 5-10 minutes of searching.) thats suitable for this use case 's the Trig TN70, which retails for $3119. So we've already blown your estimate by a factor of 3. And that's just for the receiver/processor module. It doesn't include the antenna, wiring, power, mounting, an
Re:It's called a black box (Score:5, Informative)
USB drives wouldn't survive anyway. Heat from a fire would kill them. Sudden deceleration would rip the components off the circuit board. Electrical faults would fry them. The USB connector itself is not waterproof anyway. Splash proof perhaps, but not "submersible to 5000m for months at a time". The connectors they use on black boxes are military grade for this reason, and rather expensive.
Styrofoam will disintegrate instantly on impact, and melt in heat.
Black boxes are already as optimized as they can be for cost and recoverability.
Re:It's called a black box (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't they build the ENTIRE PLANE out of USB drives?
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I've seen them walk the so-called "black box" through the passenger cabin before. It's actually orange. Or at least the one I saw was.
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Not true - the OP said ORANGE :)
Yeah, it was really stupid to paint the box black :)
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Kickstart that... (Score:2)
Numerous bits of ignorance. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) You spend cash, you burn fuel. Trying to combine environmental concerns with this issue is a POOR idea. It's not a major cause of fossil fuel use, there are far better ways to reduce fossils fuels. These are two separate issues - a) fossil fuels and b) finding lost aircraft.
2) Your limited concept of a black box is clearly not the answer. It demonstrates ignorance about many of the issues involved, including weight, time, floating recovery, ejection from sinking aircraft, etc. A far simpler solution is to simply have all planes continuously broadcast their GPS location whenever they go below a certain altitude or descend too quickly. Have them broadcast using a satellite phone system that covers the ENTIRE world - including the oceans, of course. Yes this would require some new satellites - but it is a global problem that the UN could easily solve with money.
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A far simpler solution is to simply have all planes continuously broadcast their GPS location whenever they go below a certain altitude or descend too quickly. Have them broadcast using a satellite phone system that covers the ENTIRE world - including the oceans, of course. Yes this would require some new satellites - but it is a global problem that the UN could easily solve with money.
What is the reason existing Iridium satellites, or geostationary communication satellites can't be used to provide a near continuous transmission of at least basic data (position, speed, etc.) at a modest update rate? I'd guess even if few kbs rate would be plenty.
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Iridium and all other civilian satellite systems (to my knowledge - and clearly I don't know jack about the military and/or espionage satellites) do not cover all the oceans Most don't cover Antartica either. Simply not enough people there to make it worth their effort.
The Atlantic is small, and mostly covered, but large areas of the Pacific Ocean are not covered by satellite phone systems.
Re:Numerous bits of ignorance. (Score:5, Informative)
Both Iridium and Orbcomm are truly global systems. Iridium satellites are in 86.9 degree orbits, and with 66 of them in active service, they provide pole to pole coverage. In fact, some of the early phones had a firmware bug that would cause them to get all confused in polar regions because they had so many satellites to choose from, and Iridium only allows hand-off between satellites going in the same general direction. Not a problem in most of the world, but at the poles, yes.
The only place where there may be issues with Iridium is over China, but that's due to licensing and legal restrictions placed by the government there, not due to any technical reason.
What you're probably thinking about is Globalstar, which is not global in reach. With Globalstar, your handset/earth station must be within single-hop distance to one of their earth-based gateways (Ie the satellite must be able to see you and a gateway at the same time). This means there is a large coverage gap in the mid pacific ocean.
Because Iridium uses inter-satellite links, all civilian traffic downlinks through their gateway in Tempe Arizona, and DoD downlinks through an earth station in Hawaii. If you make an Iridium to Iridium call, there is a good chance that it will get routed directly through the satellite constellation and never go through Tempe (or Hawaii).
Re:Numerous bits of ignorance. (Score:4)
I was in fact referencing Globalstar and had assumed it was the same for the other systems.
Thank you for educating me.
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Iridium and all other civilian satellite systems (to my knowledge - and clearly I don't know jack about the military and/or espionage satellites) do not cover all the oceans Most don't cover Antartica either.
Do you have a reference for that? Since Iridium satellites are in polar orbits they cross the entire Earth, and the wikipedia page at least claims global coverage including the poles.
And a page at the Iridium site claims:
Iridium is the only satellite communications provider capable of offering critical air-to-ground flight safety voice and data service to commercial aircraft around the globe.
https://www.iridium.com/soluti... [iridium.com]
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Iridium has 66 sats in low polar orbits, giving them 100% coverage of the Earth's surface, Inmarsat used geostationary orbits and has coverage of most of the Earth within ~80 degrees of the equator. In the MH370 case, the last communications received were from the Inmarsat terminal on the plane. The problem is that the signals didn't have location data, and the services that would provide locations were disabled.
As most countries migrate to ADS-B, there will be more planes regularly transmitting their cur
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Iridium service is 100% global, even on the north and south poles. It uses a large constellation of low earth orbit satellites.
Inmarsat [inmarsat.com] has no coverage north of 75 degrees N and south of 50 degrees S latitude.
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Cost.
It's also part of ADS-B [wikipedia.org] which will make it cheaper in future, however all things like this take time.
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Re:Numerous bits of ignorance. (Score:5, Informative)
A far simpler solution is to simply have all planes continuously broadcast their GPS location whenever they go below a certain altitude or descend too quickly. Have them broadcast using a satellite phone system that covers the ENTIRE world - including the oceans, of course. Yes this would require some new satellites - but it is a global problem that the UN could easily solve with money.
What is the reason existing Iridium satellites, or geostationary communication satellites can't be used to provide a near continuous transmission of at least basic data (position, speed, etc.) at a modest update rate? I'd guess even if few kbs rate would be plenty.
Commercial aircraft *already* do broadcast pretty much continuously using ACARS [wikipedia.org]...
The problem is twofold
1. Planes fly very high and go fast and they have wings which generate aerodynamic lift which result in a huge search area when something goes wrong and they stop sending these pings...
2. The ACARS system is very old and currently doesn't transmit GPS information and the location determined by a combination of radar and triangulation. The newer ADS-B [wikipedia.org] system will remedy this as it adds tracking information, but is currently only being deployed now and does not exist in older aircraft.
In fact ADS-B is *already* planned to link with iridium satellites (with newer satellites to be launched in the next few years), but up-linking with geosync satelllite isn't very practical (because they are very far away, and they don't launch new ones very often)...
But of course /.-readers have the whole world figured out already, so maybe we can lobby scrap the ADS-B system and equip all new aircraft with USB sticks instead...
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The new Iridium NEXT satellites should be in place by the end of 2017. Nav Canada is going to use the ADS-B service to monitor northern air space starting in 2018.
With four Iridum satellites in range, it should be possible to do MLAT positioning even with the old ADS-B.
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Perhaps the funniest thing ever said on /.
sat phone (Score:4, Insightful)
If we are playing this game, then why not have all that data being sent through a sat phone link real time?
Re:sat phone (Score:5, Funny)
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Connectivity sucks over the ocean. There aren't cell towers every few miles. Satellites work, but the only real players are Inmarsat [wikipedia.org] and Iridium [wikipedia.org]. Neither of them are going to give their bandwidth away for free. And as MH370 demonstrated, if it is an intentional aircraft downing, disabling the system is easy for a knowledgeable terrorist.
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GPS, up-link, and power-supply would be only accessible by ground crew.
Pilots (and airlines) have some real problems with power sources that they cannot disconnect in the event of fire. [mirror.co.uk]
When all of the systems fail... (Score:3)
...what deploys the USB drives?
You're stuck with a common dilemma - do you eject on a single failure and lose your entire record if there's an in-flight on on-the-ground anomoly? Do you have to have impact before failure, and if so what monitors the plane statistics when the main systems go down? Can you guarantee that the ejection would be safe AND effective (upside down - ejects into ground)?
The black boxes DO have radio beacons that aid in tracking, and they're a good bit better for tracking than the relying on visibility of a fist-sized piece of dayglo orange styrofoam with an led blinker.
You should look up "flight search and recovery" on Google - it will give you all the information you need to finish that 5th grade report on airplanes you're writing.
Otherwise CNN would go out of business (Score:2)
Just Another Government Subsidy. Shouldn't the airlines have to pay for the cost of finding the wreckage of their planes? I think that would have some interesting effects on aircraft maintenance. Or - heh - you could choose the cheaper airline that takes the "shit happens" approach.
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I rather have a government funded proffesional or military SAR service searching for me than having the same guys searching who managed to lose my plane already. ... and needs it anyway. Why not utilize it for civilian reason?
Why the government hate? The military already has a SAR section
Better idea - buddy system (Score:3)
Why not require every plane to fly in tandem with some other plane? That way if one gets lost you have an external observer. You could even make one of the planes an entirely luxury first-class plane with a pool and huge windows, so the people from the other plane can watch the first class plane having a good time.
Good question with stupid solution (Score:5, Interesting)
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Aircraft do transmit data to satellites periodically. It's expensive though. Lots of aircraft, satellites with expensive receivers covering the whole world, on reserved bands... So it's only used for essential engine monitoring and aircraft health data. Minimized to the minimum number of bits possible.
I don't know if it would be cost effective to include GPS coordinates in the data. It might not help the search that much... If the aircraft electronics fail or it breaks up in mid air, it can travel quite a l
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A simplistic solution that at first sounds reasonable to a real important problem, but in retrospect is totally stupid.
Is that you Donald Trump?
If mere citizens got to approve... (Score:2)
However, in the case of this poster I'm OK if he goes lost and no one bothers to look for him - the naivety it took to develop his original posting is truly Slashdot-worthy.
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If mere citizens got to approve all the stupid stuff governments do, there wouldn't be much government left.
No, the other way around. When mere citizens directly, through mob-style-democracy, vote for programs, spending, and services ... they generally set up a bunch of bankrupting entitlements and impossible budget friction that it takes decades to clean up after. See: California.
Why not ... (Score:3)
Why not just stream the data to a satellite while flying over water?
The technology is there. The engines stream data continuously (we know that from MH370).
Much better idea (Score:2)
Here's a much better idea: just have the plane constantly online. The passengers will be happier anyway if they can access the internet from the 'comfort' of their seats, and the plane itself can log its location with HQ at any moment. Little telltale signs like, ohh, depressurisation, massive drops in altitude, etc. could immediately start a search and rescue operation, possibly before the impact has even taken place.
The technology is not only already there, it is in fact already installed on most planes a
Good Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Now let us just tweak it a little...
Sometimes airplane crashes are fiery, styrofoam burns easily, lets wrap them in a tough stainless steel shell.
Oh, when that shell gets hot, the styrofoam will melt, and the heat will destroy the flash drives. If we use a special wax instead the wax will absorb heat as it changes state, that will protect the drives.
Hmm, now they don't float, even if we wrap them in something floaty it may get burned/torn off in a crash. We could put an audio transducer in them, and when they get "unplugged" in a crash they could start automatically pinging.
But just having coordinates won't help us figure out why the plane crashed, lets record a bunch of environmental and control status on them as well.
Of course it would be nice to be able to cast some light on why the controls were in the state they were in, maybe we should record an audio stream from the cockpit as well.
Hey, that might be too much data for this single box, lets put 2 of them on the plane, one for enviro/mechanical status and location, and one for the human side of the equation.
Oh, wait.......
Sure It's reinventing the flight recorder, but.... (Score:2)
But surely this is a hangover from the earlier era when data recording was done by things that were big, bulky and expensive. Therefore aircraft designers had no choice to put all their eggs in one (very very tough) basket.
Now data storage devices are tiny, why not have a system that disperses hundreds, each with a copy of the flight data, in the
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It still not change the SAR effort, you have to do it immediately on a chance of survivors thats your first 72 hours or so after that it's body recovery to give family closure.
I like the self-ejecting part... (Score:2)
...maybe with some dose of self-buoyancy, too.
It's obviously way more complicated than the armchair designer can imagine, but I wonder if:
1) The black box could be made to be ejected in the case of an airplane crash
2) Made buoyant somehow so that it will float once ejected
3) Configured with a GPS receiver and logger so that when it was found, even if it had drifted many miles from the crash site, it would give a pretty good idea of where it crashed
(1) is probably a tougher condition than it sounds to define
Stupid idea (Score:2)
The problem with water crashes is that you don't know how the plane will crash into the water, so it's tough to design a mechanism which will survive a crash and reliably release a fl
Why not just record all flight data to an iPhone? (Score:5, Funny)
Why not just record all flight data to an iPhone? And then when the plane crashes, you use "Find my iPhone" and boom!, you've located the crash site.
it's the people (Score:4, Insightful)
Who the hell is Max_W? (Score:2)
W-T-literal-F, editors? News for nerds? Stuff that matters?
Who is Max_W and why should I care about his black box replacement idea? Is he an expert in aviation safety? Is he a search and recovery worker? Is he an aerospace engineer working for Boeing or Airbus or even Embraer? Is he a regulator with the FAA? An NTSB investigator? Or is he just some random poster whose idle musings you've turned into an article?
Re:Who the hell is Max_W? (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, the questions was stupid, yes. The entire time I read it I was very "Wha?" about it but it did spawn some good and informative postings. That's more than I can say about all the political and entertainment slop that gets posted here. Even many of the computing and science related posts are lacking in truly informative postings anymore. It was a nice change of pace.
Think they haven't been trying to solve this? (Score:4, Informative)
After AF447 and then again after MH370, the people who deal with stuff for a living have been discussing this. Well, not this kinda lame proposal, but the problem that it is trying to solve.
Here is a GAO report [gao.gov] on the topic.
As far as the "fossil fuel" wasted on the search, a) as noted elsewhere, you want to search for survivors (JAL123, a 747, crashed into the side of a mountain and there were 4 survivors) and b) even if you know exactly where the plane went down, the fuel used to search is small compared to the fuel spent on recovery.
Discuss solutions (Score:5, Insightful)
This has got to be some of the most clueless garbage I've seen on Slashdot in years, obviously from someone whose only experience with aerospace is as self-loading cargo.
It could also be from a teenager trying to ask a legitimate question to a website full of smart people, or someone from an underdeveloped area who was taught about energy conservation but doesn't grasp the complexities of aircraft construction.
I'm not suggesting we be like StackExchange, but we're the smart people in the room and are known for +5 insightful posts that look at all sides of an issue.
The OP does have a point: we seem to spend a lot of time looking for planes when they go down, and there seems to be a lot of common-sense technological solutions that could be implemented.
I hear there are pilots and aircraft engineers on this site. Maybe we could, you know, discuss solutions?
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We're known for +5 Insightful that agrees with the majority political opinion of Slashdot as filtered by who has mod points at the time, often to the hilarious effect that the highly-rated comments are stupid and defective. I'm pretty sure *many* of the people who are nodding and agreeing with me on economics comments are just happy I touched their feel-good liberal or feel-good conservative standpoint in some aspect, so I get modded up for saying "minimum wage is bad" or "we need a better welfare system"
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Not that the same thing ever happens in scholastic peer review, or a movie studio, or presidential candidate selection.
The vagaries of social approval are more transparent i
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I think the discussion in this post is great, and this is why I come back to Slashdot.
The problem itself is nothing.
From and engineering standpoint, locating a plane is no big deal. We all know that if we want to find a fallen plane, the best approach is to track it all the time. It's expensive, takes time, but also has a lot of advantages for regulating traffic.
The fact that this is such an obvious idea and is not being done yet, explains how hard it is to make changes to this kind of thing. It's not for l
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Strangely, doesn't cite WTF Wikimapedia?! [wikipedia.org]
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It's the debris (and the flight data/voice recorders) that we want. But it's a cultural thing that we return bodies to survivors so they will have something to bury and mourn. Look at what the searches we've undertaken in Vietnam for the remains of military pilots.
One (usually unstated) argument against streaming complete DFDR data through a satellite is that then, we might not bother looking for bodies if we know why the plane crashed. And some people don't like the idea that their relatives will become f
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I thought such a thing already existed, but isn't mandated by FIFA (or whoever it is that's in charge) so nobody uses it because $$$.