FAA Mandates Major Aircraft "Black Box" Upgrade

coondoggie writes "Earlier this week the FAA mandated upgrades and updates to aircraft voice and data recorders within the US. The goal of the updates: to assist future investigations with 'more and better data' from accidents and incidents. The 'mandate means manufacturers such as Honeywell and L-3 Communications as well as operators of airplanes and helicopters with 10 or more seats, must employ voice recorders, also known as black boxes, that capture the last two hours of cockpit audio instead of the current 15 to 30 minutes. The new rules also require an independent backup power source for the voice recorders to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted. Voice recorders also must use solid state technology instead of magnetic tape, which is vulnerable to damage and loss of reliability.'"

Comments

It sounds so easy but

[gnutoo]

When everyone can get $40 mp3 players with 8 hour playback time on next to no power, you would thing this is going to be the cheapest thing ever. Even general purpose data recorders should be cheap when GB worth are so commonly available. Then you run into qualifications and secrets. Watch these boxes run into the thousands of dollars per aircraft and weep for the paying public.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[engagebot]

I happen to work at the L3 Communications facility that builds the flight recorders in Sarasota, Fl. Trust me, there's a lot more to a flight recorder than just an ipod in a big orange case. As is, a black box weights 25lbs or more easily. Do you know what kind of force it has to be able to withstand and come out unscathed? Second of all, its not just a storage medium. It contains tons of instruments that actually measure certain parameters about the flight too.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

When everyone can get $40 mp3 players with 8 hour playback time on next to no power, you would thing this is going to be the cheapest thing ever. Even general purpose data recorders should be cheap when GB worth are so commonly available. Then you run into qualifications and secrets. Watch these boxes run into the thousands of dollars per aircraft and weep for the paying public.

Weep? There isn't some international conspiracy to make black boxes cost more. They are expensive because they need to survive impacts in which hundreds of Gs are put on them. It is one thing to make an mp3 player retain a lot of data and quite another to be able to make that mp3 player retain its data after hitting the ground at 800 km/hr.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[SlashWombat]

I recently worked on a data recorder for trains. (no voice, but train data + GPS co-ords, etc) are all stored on a CF card which is encased in a large aluminium block surounded by a good insulator, then encased in a heavy steel box, all inside a very strong case ...)

It certainly survived all the standard test (like puncture, high temperatures for extended time periods, etc).

So, yes, this is very easy to do in this day and age. (Done again, it would undoubtedly be better to use SD cards, as these are even smaller than CF, require fewer connection to the interface and would make the insulation/protection even easier!

Re:It sounds so easy but

[tompaulco]

As is, a black box weights 25lbs or more easily...
It contains tons of instruments...
That IS quite impressive. Using black box material, I wonder if there is a way to make the plane weigh only a few thousand pounds while carrying hundreds of tons of cargo.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[rabiddeity]

The difference between a $40 mp3 player and a flight recorder is that the flight recorder must be engineered to never fail, ever. If you plug the mp3 player into an outlet to recharge and a power surge hits, it will get fried. You expect that. You can buy another one. But the flight recorder has to withstand the aircraft getting struck by lightning repeatedly, and still continue to function.

In addition, every component must survive the severe stresses involved in a plane crash. The severe acceleration can cause large components to get ripped off their solder points. The device will likely be cooked to several hundred degrees as the plane burns around it, so all the components need to survive that (electrolytic capacitors will explode well before that). Heck, if the plane spontaneously breaks apart on a trans-Pacific flight, the box gets cooled to the outside air temperature of around -50 C before slamming into the ocean at high speed. Let's see your music player take that and survive. And I hope whatever software running the thing wrote the data out cleanly before everything went to hell, because if any of those stresses caused a hardware glitch that overwrites or erases the log, you get to tell the FAA that you really don't know why that plane crashed. Oops.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[damista]

The Article is talking about the cockpit voice recorder, not the flight data recorder. That's two different things. The flight data recorder naturally has to have enough instruments built in but what "tons of instruments that actually measure certain parameters about the flight" do you need in the cockpit voice recorder?

Re:It sounds so easy but

[AJWM]

A few thousand bucks for a piece of equipment on an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars is a pretty trivial amount. It probably costs more to change the color of the fabric on the seats.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[0100010001010011]

And the difference between a mp3 player and a black box is an mp3 player will fit in my pocket. You can get away with redundancy that you never could have in the past. Even tape drives have shrunk.

You could have 2 mil spec 16 GB SD cards, 2 80 GB hard drives AND 2 tape decks in probably the same space as the old tape decks. As far as the environment, that's almost all casing. Same with lightning strikes, if they have it figured out now, why change away from it (other than advancements in technology). It's not like these guys are saying "hey lets stick an iPod in a plane and call it good."

Re:It sounds so easy but

[garett_spencley]

"because if any of those stresses caused a hardware glitch that overwrites or erases the log, you get to tell the FAA that you really don't know why that plane crashed. Oops."

No problem. We'll just tell them that CowboyNeil shot it down.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[mabhatter654]

like all good regulations though, they do many things very backwards. I've worked for a contractor too and many practices, while safe, are outright backwards given the leaps in technology. An iPhone and Wii controller are probably more advanced, and more reliable... not entirely fit for the job of a black box, but the direction it should be going... half the size and twice the function. The 50 year-old engineers that design this stuff are just plain out-of-touch with what technology can do now... flat out unable to understand it's application in many cases I've seen. Something like an iPod Touch has 16 Gigabytes of data... that's plenty of storage for what they need. As most instruments are digital (or should be) it should be easy to interface to the outside instruments rather than have so many enclosed as the quality of external instruments is much better now. So much has changed, an inline data trap with the fly-by-wire would be more in line, tried and true similar to any plain network logger... but aircraft people just don't think like that.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[kylehase]

So "black box"es are actually orange? What a misnomer.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[hjf]

The worst airplane crash of an Argentine airplane was the Austral 2553 (Uruguay, 1997). The pitot tube (the little thingy that gives you the speed of the aircraft) failed (it froze, and the alarms failed due to lack of maintenance), and the pilots just keep pushing the gas. The plane hit the ground, perpendicular, at 1200kph. The black box survived: The speed indicator jumped from 300kph to 800kph in 3 seconds (sudden defrost of the pitot tube).

Anyone who says any kind of consumer electronics device is going to work after hitting the ground at 1200kph, obviously has no idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austral_L%C3%ADneas_A%C3%A9reas_Flight_2553
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Black_box.aeroplane.JPG

Re:It sounds so easy but

[TubeSteak]

But the flight recorder has to withstand the aircraft getting struck by lightning repeatedly, and still continue to function. Discovery Channel had a show that included a segment about how planes survive lightning strikes.

Long story short: Lightning travels along either the aluminum skin or special strips stuck to any non-metallic surfaces and continues on its way without damaging anything.

These are the type of strips the Discovery show was talking about. AFAIK, in a properly maintained plane, lightning almost never goes anywhere near the electronics.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[davolfman]

Correction. It probably costs a CRAPLOAD more to change the color of the seats. If anything I'm betting that the changeover to solid state storage is going to be making these cheaper by at least an order of magnitude.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[lhaeh]

One of the cool things that adds to the reliability in the extreme environment you mentioned is the tape it's self. It's not a tape at all actually, but a steel wire. They cracked one open on this cool old show called "The Secret Life of Machines."

Re:It sounds so easy but

[T-Bone-T]

The Air Force actually spent extra to have cloth seats installed(leather was standard) in many of the jets used to transport generals so it would look like they actually spent less.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[rabiddeity]

Smaller components are more susceptible to interference and voltage transients because they operate at lower voltages. You'll have to redesign the power supply to output a lower voltage, but realistically this also means that the original circuits for power conditioning won't work as well as they did on the old hardware. On a lightning strike, the circuit might let a 10V transient through which wouldn't harm the old analog tapes at all, but 10V spikes might be enough to glitch or erase modern SSD chips that operate at 3.3V or lower. Redundancy won't help you if your identical devices all get fried on a single voltage transient. The proper solution is to design a new circuit using high quality components and test rigorously, and that isn't cheap. The new parts needed to improve power conditioning also require more space, meaning that you gained some space from smaller media but lost some to power conditioning.

If you want to use multiple smaller tapes, consider the following. While improvements in technology have allowed us to make smaller tapes, they have also reduced the physical tolerances in the recorder. A head mashing against a tape isn't as disastrous as a hard drive head crash, but it still can't be good for the media. The tensile strength of the smaller tape would also have to be evaluated to make sure it doesn't self-destruct on sudden acceleration. Again, if one tape snaps under certain conditions a redundant one probably will snap too. Maybe the older tapes are more durable. Maybe they aren't. Without testing it's impossible to tell. Testing costs money.

I hope I don't have to explain why spinning platter hard drives are not a good idea on a flight recorder.

Give the original engineers a bit of credit. Those analog tapes might be stone-age and oversized, but they're time-tested and they work. The reluctance to replace them comes from years of experience saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" -- especially when lives hang in the balance. If we can design something that withstands impact better, then that's great, but we need to be very cautious not to introduce new flaws.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[narzy]

so it's more like an iPhone in a big orange metal box? with accelerometers and shit?

Re:It sounds so easy but

[amirulbahr]

I notice that they are not requiring retro-fitting of existing fleets. Out of curiosity, how much does one of these things cost an airline?

Re:It sounds so easy but

[eonlabs]

To be fair, my gamecube is dead. In its wake, I've been playing my super and regular nintendo.

I beg to argue that older technologies have stood the test of time compared to our modern works which last two years or less.
I would be far more interested in a black box that works reliably, even with some moderate internal hardware failures.

I should also note, the regular nintendo we've been using is split in half and missing a large chunk. The gamecube could be mistaken for new.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[ryanov]

It is generally not done. We saw this in cases like ValuJet 592, where the FDR had very little information on it compared to modern aircraft. I seem to remember reading that the older aircraft had an FDR that recorded 9 or 11 parameters whereby modern aircraft generally watch hundreds of things. According to all-knowing Wikipedia, in 2002 the minimum number of parameters was raised from 29 to 88. Retrofits are not required in any case I know of.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[lintux]

Yeah. :-) AFAIK they're easier to find between smoking pieces of airplane if it's orange.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[casuist99]

I certainly hope the cockpit voice recorder can sustain those sorts of loads. The airframe itself is designed (by Federal Aviation Regulation requirements) to withstand only a 9g crash loading. I'd like the cockpit voice recorder to survive when all that's left of the plane are pieces the size of a small book. I have to say, 9g surprised me when I first learned that particular requirement - but your body would be quite unhappy with anything more, and the airframe would have to be prohibitively expensive and heavy to withstand more.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[casuist99]

While mostly true, maybe you've never seen the sorts of repairs that can be required after lightening strikes to an airplane. The points of entry and exit from a lightning strike look very much like burn marks. You're mostly safe in flight - assuming proper design measures have been taken to isolate circuity and fuel, but the airplane still requires a check by an engineer to determine what if any maintenance will be required. A hole in the fuselage can be fixed, but you shouldn't be under the illusion that "nothing" is damaged. Rather, the damage is typically minor.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[jimicus]

The parts may be cheaper, which reduces ongoing costs.

But the initial cost of engineering a device which can withstand hitting the ground at a few hundred miles per hour, still be readable afterwards and getting it through all the testing to prove it can do this is most definitely non-trivial.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say, 9g surprised me when I first learned that particular requirement - but your body would be quite unhappy with anything more, and the airframe would have to be prohibitively expensive and heavy to withstand more.

9g is tough on body, but it can cope with it for a short time (it can withstand punches of much more gs), while airframe designed for 9g limit would catastrophically fail. It seems unreasonable. Why should humans fail last? Safety means machines should operate correctly over complete human "alive" domain. If I have a chance to survive, I need supporting equipment to be with me all the way through it. A little overengineering safety margins never killed anyone... or did it?

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

Lightning traveling along nearby conduits will not damage your equipment through lightning conduction, but through electromagnetic induction and radio wave flooding (short current pulse creates ultrawide spectrum emmisions). While even a simple wire cage suffices to protect you from conducting high current of lightning, only a good (very low electric resistance, high electron mobility) plate (foil) shielding can protect you from EM pulse. Each opening, gap in shield (and you have to have doors, windows, hatches, etc... on airframe) lets some part of radio energy spectrum inside and will create problems, currents, voltage spikes, semiconductors' heating.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[cheater512]

A iPod, Wii controller or any similar device would never pass the reliability tests require by the black boxes.

Remember they need to survive the aircraft blowing up, than smashing in to the water and sinking and it must still operate perfectly.
Ensuring that it works in tough conditions like that is expensive.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[91degrees]

Flash memory tends to be able to withstand well over the 2000Gs its rated for. Doesn't that count as consumer electronics? And it's not as though we care about any of the other components after the plane's crashed.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[saider]

The chip may be able to withstand it, but the circuit and enclosure is another story. Considering that most consumer electronics will shatter when dropped only about 10 feet, I'd say that the "My iPod can do that!" crowd is exceptionally ignorant.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Jesus_666]

What interests me is: Is solid state technology really far enough for flight voice recorders? From what I've heard SSDs have a tendency to fail in high-throughput applications (like constantly writing a voice recording to the disk) in a matter of months. Do you think it's wise to use SSDs exclusively?

Perhaps a safer approach would be to use both SSDs and tape. It's unlikely that both die at the same time, except if the box itself is destroyed - and then no storage technology on earth would help. Of course that means more complexity...

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Lumpy]

and the pilots just keep pushing the gas. The plane hit the ground, perpendicular, at 1200kph.

as a amateur pilot it blows my mind that a commercial pilot would freak out about such a failure and continue to throttle up. You have a large number of other indicators you can use. Even in pitch black night and thick fog you have some indicators they teach you in flight school to make it so you dont hit the ground at full throttle.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

>Smaller components are more susceptible to interference and voltage transients because they operate at lower voltages.

I think you mean "transistors". Otherwise your statement doesn't make sense for the regime that typical SMD components exist in, where dielectric breakdown is really the only limiting factor, and isn't that far away from through-hole components.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

"The 50 year-old engineers that design this stuff are just plain out-of-touch with what technology can do now."

You mean the 50 year old engineers that designed the hardware you're talking about in the first place? Those guys? Yeah, out of touch.

"flat out unable to understand it's application in many cases I've seen."

You don't even understand the apostrophe.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[cubesquared]

I'm sure this has been considered, but why not transmit the data continuously during a flight via satellite etc. to a remote recording system. This could be used with an onboard recorder as the source to validate complete transmission of all data. In the event of a mishap, the survival of the onboard unit is not as critical and accident data can be analyzed instantly after an incident or even during inflight malfunctions.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"I beg to argue that older technologies have stood the test of time compared to our modern works which last two years or less."

In all fairness, the SNES was solid state. The GameCube has moving parts. Obviously I do not know the extent of the damage to the GameCube, but given their inherent designs, it seems a given that the SNES would out-live it.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[ePhil_One]

Something like an iPod Touch has 16 Gigabytes of data...

An iPod touch doesn't need to survive high speed impacts, hours in a jet fuel blaze, operate in the thin air at 60k feet, in 40 below temperatures, and last for decades in continuous operation. These boxes record to metal wire because tapes melt, lose elastisicty wear out, etc. 50 year old guys think of these things because they have experience of seeing new technologies come and go, and can apprieciate what is applicable and what isn't. PMR Hard drives? Bad idea. PMR recording to a continuous wire loop? That could work...

Re:It sounds so easy but

[bcattwoo]

as a amateur pilot it blows my mind that a commercial pilot would freak out about such a failure and continue to throttle up. You have a large number of other indicators you can use. Even in pitch black night and thick fog you have some indicators they teach you in flight school to make it so you dont hit the ground at full throttle.
You need to read the wikipedia link. The GP summary of the events is somewhat misleading. They didn't just throttle up and drill into the ground under control. The pilots believed they were at risk of stalling and deployed the slats. They were in fact going much too fast and one of the slats was ripped off the plane leading to a loss of control. Compounding the problem was that an alarm that was supposed to indicate a frozen pitot tube failed to go off.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[steveo777]

To be perfectly fair, my Nano has done that. Many times. 20', actually. Perhaps it was the exception. More to the point, I think that if you've got enough room in a 25lb box for a magnetic tape drive, there has to be a way to shock proof 1GB of circuitry required to record a whole flight. I'm not an engineer at all. I'm just saying this out of a blind hope that something relatively stationary could be more hardy than a mechanical system. I'd suggest a few ideas, but I'm sure the engineers have thought far past those ideas.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[XJHardware]

Big deal. Corn survives a trip through my G.I. tract without any problem. It's amazing stuff. Do you know what kind of forces it has to endure there? Build your black boxes out of corn.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[hjf]

At the time, the company was in a severe debt (still is but they're much better now, they ordered a couple A380's). Pilots received no training, no simulator, and were forced to work in "if you don't fly, you're fired" conditions. The commercial aviation in Argentina was (and I think it still is) under Argentine Air Force regulations, one of the most corrupt forces. Airports were privatized from the airline desks to the door, but behind that it was still the same. Traffic control wasn't privatized: we have no radars in most airports (the narcs keep it that way), only in the Ezeiza airport. Other radars are powered off at certain times (night, ideal for dropping marijuana loads coming from Bolivia in the middle of the night).

There is no regard for security in air transportation. LAPA 3142 was completely destroyed after aborting takeoff, hitting the fence at the end of the runway, crossing over a busy highway (crushing a Chrysler Neon on its way) and finally crashing into a gas thing. Yes: the runway points straight into a highway and in the middle there are underground gasoline and gas pipes.

In the movies "Fuerza Area S.A." (Air Force Inc.) and "Whiskey Romeo Zulu" (LAPA 3142 was LV-WRZ), former LAPA pilot Enrique Piñeyro explains the causes of both accidents and the situation of aviation in Argentina. Fuerza Aerea is a documentary, WRZ is a movie (based on the true story).

Now, take both movies with a grain of salt: Piñeyro, as a pilot, tries to defend other pilots. But I, personally, think that if you're not trained to fly in other-than-ideal conditions, or if you don't know what to do when alarms flash, you should not fly. The same if planes are not in condition (in LV-WRZ, Piñeyro asks the maintenance staff about the engine fire extinguishers (IIRC), and the guy tells him "Just fly carefully"). But pilots never went on strike or anything. Piñeyro justifies everything on the fact that "pilots didn't receive adequate training" and "airplanes were not in 100% condition". And he gets angry when people call it a "Pilot Error" (just listen to LAPA 3142 CVR, you'll hear "beep beep beep beep ..." and the pilot asking "what's that?")

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

s/tons/oodles/

Re:It sounds so easy but

[merreborn]

On a lightning strike, the circuit might let a 10V transient through which wouldn't harm the old analog tapes at all, but 10V spikes might be enough to glitch or erase modern SSD chips that operate at 3.3V or lower.

Good news: there's more to the electronics hardware than consumer-grade hardware. A little bit of googling turns up press release announcing 50V and 20V chips for industrial applications.

Seems like there's probably already high voltage hardware on the market, if required.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Kelbear]

"I should also note, the regular nintendo we've been using is split in half and missing a large chunk"

On the other hand my nintendo even when new required about a half-hour of blowing ino the cartridge and slot until I turn purple, combined with slapping the box and reset button until the grey screen gave way to the start screen.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[meatmanek]

You're assuming the device is going to stop immediately when it hits the ground. That would only be true if the black box was duct taped onto the nose of the plane. If it's back even a few feet, the plane will absorb some of the impact. I'm also assuming that the black box is going to have something (foam?) to absorb some of the vibrations. It's like the difference between landing feet first and head first from a 3 story fall. Same initial speed, same final speed, different acceleration.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[necrogram]

Lets try an excersize. Take one of those $40 dollar mp3 players and throw it at a concrete wall at a speed in excess of 140 miles per hour. What do you think the results will be?

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Shinobi]

It's quite simple: If you build a stronger, more durable machine, along comes a bigger idiot, deciding to push the machine to its limits, and unfortunately often causing death and/or injury not only to him/herself, but also to others.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[treeves]

You didn't really read it, did you?
The article talks about flight data recorder in the first, fourth, and fifth paragraphs. Even if you just read the /. summary, they're mentioned in the first sentence. You must not be new here.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Comboman]

In addition, every component must survive the severe stresses involved in a plane crash.

Why? After the crash, it's job is done. It doesn't need to record any more. As long as the data is retrievable, it doesn't matter if the recorder is toast.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[LeadSongDog]

Now, put that Ipod nano inside an old sneaker and try again. The Ipod might fail, but the chip inside will survive and be readable.~~~~

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Carnildo]

It's not important for a flight data recorder to take maximum advantage of available technology. What matters is that it can last for half a century of operation, and that it is nearly indestructable.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[CharlieG]

In reality, the only part that really matters is the memory, the rest is a luxury. First thing you do, make sure you use g-10 glass boards and ceramic package chips. Next. You talk to your ME, and he calls say, Dow Corning to talk about potting compounds. Depending on different electrical, cooling, fire and other needs, they pick out a potting compund. Of the top of my head, it's probably be one of the glass bead filled compounds, as I can't see a memory chip, or a dozen needed serious cooling capability. At this point, your ME designs an enclosure and connector - probably some fairly bulky ampex type. The entire enclosure, with the memory inside is potted (don't forget to pull a vacuum to get the gas bubbles out) and the enclosure sealed - often a metal can soldered closed. Yhen that MIGHT go in another can - and then that goes inside the rest of the recorder, and it goes in it's own can

During all of this, he's been consulting with the guy who runs the environmental test lab, who probably has more experience in what really happens in the tests - what tends to fail, and what tends to work (in a flight data recorder, I'd be worried about the ingress/egress points of signals - ditto the "memory block") - connectors tend to shear. Moving parts are "bad" (hence the FAA wanting to get rid of magnetic tape, with it's motors etc)

Your environmental test guy then either takes the prototype/early production unit to his lab, and beats on it per the spec, or, more likelike for prototype acceptance testing, calls one of the dozen or so places around the country (such as http://www.daytontbrown.com/ Dayton T Brown or http://www.aeco.com/ American Environments (Both on Long Island due to the fact that there used to be 2 Airplane Mfgs here, plus a lot of electronics companies), and you have THEM do the testing for the spec. BTW Your test guy and your ME will probably work with your internal machine shop to build the mechanical test fixtures, and an the test guy will work with the EE and the prototype wiring shop to build the electrical test fixtures - so that all these fistures survive the testing environment

While it not "simple" or "every day", it IS almost routine. I probably used to put something through some sort of acceptance test 1-2 times/year (and tests could take weeks to months). Sometimes things don't work - and it's back to the ME/EE and saying "OK, here is what failed" - and why - and doing a re-design

Re:It sounds so easy but

[eonlabs]

All the moving parts on the cube work.
The disk spins fine, no weird noises, and the laser moves back and forth.

I have yet to test to see if the laser is faulty. I also plan to open it up eventually to see if I can find anything obvious.

Warranty is up, so it's another potential project. :D

Re:It sounds so easy but

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

All the moving parts on the cube work.
The disk spins fine, no weird noises, and the laser moves back and forth.

I have yet to test to see if the laser is faulty. I also plan to open it up eventually to see if I can find anything obvious.

Warranty is up, so it's another potential project. :D I had a DVD player a few years ago that spontaneously died with symptoms very similar to yours. The laser moved back and forth and back and forth and back and forth etc. Over time, the cable attached to the laser fatigued and one of the inputs broke, shutting off the laser. That may or may not be related to your problem, I'm just trying to point out why the moving parts bit is a prob. :)

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that the reason that we don't build stronger planes is that we don't want dumb people crashing them into us?

Re:It sounds so easy but

[AltCtlDel]

Give the original engineers a bit of credit. Those analog tapes might be stone-age and oversized, but they're time-tested and they work. The reluctance to replace them comes from years of experience saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" -- especially when lives hang in the balance.
(Emphasis mine)
By the time they're searching for the recorder, its ability to function won't have any impact on lives, just lawsuits.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Discoflamingo13]

And "almost never" is completely unacceptable from a regulatory perspective, where the reality is that not every plane is going to be in as good shape as the day it came off the line. If a plane is not well-maintained, this shielding can (and probably will) fail. Aircraft flying through a storm can be struck by lightning dozens of times - over the lifetime of an aircraft, that's a lot of wear and tear that needs to be fixed. Since not every plane is as well-maintained as it should be, the regulatory groups for avionics (FAA, EUROCAE, etc.) have standards for electromagnetic interference (see RTCA document DO-254) which must be met by all hardware on the plane for when that shielding fails. There are quite a few laboratories where, for thousands of dollars an hour, you too can simulate repeated lightning strikes on the electronic equipment of your choice.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Discoflamingo13]

If the new recorders weigh less than the old recorders, and are easier to maintain, the airlines will make damn sure to retrofit if the cost-benefit analysis is right (and they are not already required to retrofit, per TFA). Most of the time, the CBA takes the form of "(less weight = less fuel) + lower maintenance costs => cost savings", balanced by "new technology => delays at gates while it gets monkeyed with => increased costs".

Re:It sounds so easy but

[geekoid]

You have no clue at all what the box must withstand.
There really isn't any consumer device you can put in one of these boxes and have it be as effective.

Please, the engineers I have worked with a quite aware of the technology around the. Jeez, your post makes you sound like a ignorant ass.

"instruments are digital (or should be) "

Why? hmm? they need to be what meets the requirements of hitting the ground at a few hundred miles an hour first, regardless of new technology.

Personally I think they should also immediatly start uploading it via a satellite as soon as certain parameters are met.
Not 100%, but it does increase the odds of data survival.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[kesuki]

on the plus side, switching to solid state media should reduce the size, and, weight, the con though is that adding 11 minutes of 'power' involves incorporating some sort of lithium ion battery UPS device, preferably on the 'outside' of the crash protection device, so as to avoid etching everything inside with the organic solvent used to make the battery work... you might also want that external battery protected against the 'random lithium ion battery explosion phenomenon' which is a freak one in a few hundred million event, but fires aboard planes are far more dangerous than in the changing room at the local mall... besides which the battery will need to be replaced if kept in service long enough, making that portion outside the black box will reduce service costs for repairing black boxes with faulty battery errors.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Dun Malg]

So "black box"es are actually orange? What a misnomer. They're "black boxes" in the engineering sense of "compartmentalization". That is, they have a number of internal functions that are entirely outside the scope of the cockpit avionics engineers' jobs. The engineers are told what sort of data the boxes eat, and have to feed the boxes exactly that sort of data and not give a moment's thought about what the boxes are DOING with the data. It's about maintaining input standardization. For example, if the input spec said "12-14v nominal, never more than 16v on pin 37" you'd expect the engineer to stay within that spec. Well, if Engineer X knew the circuit (as designed in the box he was connecting to) watching pin 37 could actually handle up to 48v, there's the chance he might design a "better" input system that used fewer parts, but occasionally spiked to 30v, knowing the box could handle it. 5 years later, a new recorder box is put in service, and really can only handle 16v on pin 37. The box complies with the spec, but now all the Nimwit Aviation A-123 aircraft with avionics designed by Engineer X silently destroy their cockpit voice recorders' input amplifiers with that 30v spike, and the next time an A-123 crashes, no one knows why....

Most engineers can be trusted not to violate spec, but if you give them nothing but the spec and make the CVR and FDR black boxes, you don't have to worry about trusting them.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[ryanov]

I thought this too, but you're forgetting the fact that figuring out what happened to an aircraft can often prevent future accidents.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Anonymous Coward]

apparently you weren't smart enough to 'take it back' and try to get a new one. i mean technology isn't perfect, even if it was built like a tank, and companies rely on the end user to test for faulty stuff like that.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Dun Malg]

there has to be a way to shock proof 1GB of circuitry required to record a whole flight Well yeah, there is. It just ain't cheap. It requires building special packaging (pronounced "expensive") for the ICs. I knew a guy who worked on the Copperhead laser guided artillery shell. He said it's non-trivial to make circuits that can survive the acceleration of being shot out of an artillery piece. Certainly it could not be done by trying to "cushion" a regular iPod.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Dun Malg]

I'm sure this has been considered, but why not transmit the data continuously during a flight via satellite Errr...bandwidth? In 2006 there were a total of around 22.8 million commercial (10+ seats) flight hours logged in the US. That is, on average, 2600+ planes in the air at any given moment. There does not exist the massive satellite infrastructure necessary (much less the terrestrial communication and storage capacity) to handle the live data streams of that many aircraft.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Dun Malg]

It seems unreasonable. Why should humans fail last? Safety means machines should operate correctly over complete human "alive" domain. It could be done, but at that point you'd be carrying fewer people due to the tremendous weight of shock-absorbing safety equipment. "Overengineering" doesn't come free. At some point, you end up with planes too expensive to buy, too unprofitable to fly, and too impractical to use. All of life is a cost-benefit analysis. No, you can't have 100% safe flight. It's completely irrational to chase after those trailing "9's" in the accident ratio. This is engineering. You push the stats out to the 7-sigma point and you say "good enough; it's safer than walking to the corner store".

Re:It sounds so easy but

[davolfman]

I'll buy that somewhat, but flash drives are already designed for unusual resiliency so I'd argue that the engineering cost to improve that to spec is a lot less than the costs it took to get tapes to be that durable. In fact I assume the manufacturing techniques have already been solved and put in industry journals thanks to the requirements of the defense aerospace industry. They were probably solved in the mid-80's at that and the chips themselves have just gotten better to the point that this particular application of the manufacturing knowhow is now practical. A solid state system has some significant engineering advantages over one with a crapload of moving parts. The testing though is going to be a bitch. I'll admit to that. After all, we're talking the height of technology from half a decade ago being mandated now, so we already have a yardstick of just how much beurocratic inertia is going to impede this: enough to hold up the implementation of an obvious idea for 5 years.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[mabhatter654]

I'd argue that an iPod or Wii controller being actively kicked around and abused 5 million units at a time have more testing put into them. Considering the abuse those items take the failure rate is pretty low. If they doubled the production costs on better materials, the items would last indefinitely, but that's not economic allocation of resources for something that becomes obsolete in 3 years.

My experience is that aircraft stuff involves lots of extra measures to make it "safe" then ultimately a bunch of "don't do that rules". Twist this wire 30 times by hand and don't let anybody within 3 feet.... I've seen first hand the rework they do to some assemblies because "redesigning" the board or layout so that the item was perfect the first time, would mean "recertification" and testing but adding 10 jumpers by hand and gluing parts on upside down is perfectly fine!!!

When Honda cuts out the pieces to your car they stamp the steel 1 time to shape. If the part misses, they don't try to fix it, they toss it. They spend a lot of time on getting parts right the very first time. The FAA has a real problem with certifications that they don't mind drilling and hammering and welding the parts 5 times (horrible labor costs, and poor final quality) but if you want to change the stamp to get the part right the FIRST time you have to refile the design... very, very wasteful.

Reality is in the middle, I'm not saying use cheap commercial electronics, but normal FAA practices are just as bad. They should have been developing and ALLOWING this 5 years ago when the materials got cheaper... but they control the situation so tightly there is no room to update anything until forced to by rules.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[mabhatter654]

why should these last for 50 years? my car doesn't, hell, my toilet doesn't expect to last that long. Technology should vastly improve by then and nobody want's to be stuck making parts 50 years from now. They SHOULDN'T be using planes that long! Look how Intel got stuck making 486 chips for the space shuttle... they STILL have to provide that same model... the specs don't allow for building newer, faster chips and evolving the design, the software isn't written to account for a faster processor, just one specific model. THAT is the problem with the whole FAA system. I've seen parts sit on shelves for 4 years because no manufacturer will make them except once every 5 years! And due to FAA rules it has to be an exact part, not a replacement used daily by millions of devices.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[mabhatter654]

I've worked at a company that tried to "repurpose" those 50 year-old engineers that were "so good" into some really cool projects, simple stuff anybody that reads MAKE should have understood. And watched them run the project into the ground and walk away because they simply don't understand modern manufacturing or customer expectations. Many of those guys are very smart, but they haven't upgraded their skills in 20 years and it shows. My experience is that the guys that build those black boxes have let their skills so atrophy that they wouldn't understand how to assemble something like an iPod, let alone design it.

Imagine the laughs we'd get if somebody was trying to write a 3D game in COBOL, on a VAX (because it ran for 20 years so it must be better) and calling it advancement... instead of using modern chips and programming languages that have long been proven to work just fine.

The article make like 2 hours of capture is a big deal, call me when it's 24 to 48 and captures and archives all of the inputs and outputs going to the cockpit. Any lame industrial automation program does that nowdays, 24/7 x 365. A modern auto factory captures and analyses megabytes of data per minute with the PC on your desk. Surely those airplane engineers can do better and package that in a nice safe box.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[jimicus]

I'm not an aerospace engineer, but my understanding is you want many of the components black box to break on impact. The only part you don't want to break on impact is the storage media.

The reason being that you've only got so much storage capacity, so it is used in a loop. Pretty useless if the black box is rescued a few days after a crash and all it contains is 15 minutes of silence recorded after the plane hit the ground.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[steveo777]

I wasn't thinking about duct taping a bunch of pillows around an iPod, no. I was thinking that if a tape recorder (I haven't seen what they really look like) can be shock proofed in such a manner, that there has to be some sort of solid state material that would survive as well.

As far as expensive goes. I don't know how expensive a 'normal' black box is. And I suppose I expected those to be somewhat expensive already. I searched Google and came up with what looked like a used model for $900. Beyond that is beyond me.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Kelbear]

I know I shouldn't respond to an anonymous coward but...

Clearly this coward has not used a nintendo.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/28/how-did-you-blow-your-nes-cartridge/

Re:It sounds so easy but

[gr8scot]

I read the same thing on the Interblag, but I don't believe it.

You'd think

[sleeponthemic]

That video surveillance would be part of the mandate.

Re:You'd think

[petermgreen]

what for? They know what the pilot is doing to the controls from the flight data recorder (which is seperate from the cockpit voice recorder to increase the chances of recovering at least one of them). They know what the pilots were saying to each other from the cockpit voice recorder. Afaict that is all they really need to know to work out what the pilots did in the runup to the crash.

Re:You'd think

[zanybrainy941]

what for?

So we can post crash videos on the Internets?

Re:You'd think

[timeOday]

I'd like to know what happened in the cockpit of United 93 on 911, the audio recordings didn't make it clear.

Re:You'd think

[grumbel]

They know what the pilot is doing to the controls from the flight data recorder That of course requires that the instruments actually work as they should. More then one plane has gone down due to instruments displaying incorrect values or pilots reading them wrong. A few cameras that actually show what is going on could help clear up a lot in some cases were the audio recording leaves the investigators with a lot of guess work. See for example Helios Airways Flight 522. There also have been accidents where the pilot switched of the working engine, not the damaged one, a little external camera showing the engine would have helped a lot in that case to notice the error before it was to late, even without recording it to a black-box.

I really don't see a good reason to not have cameras, after all when you want to find out what went wrong it is best to have as much information as possible, limiting the recording to audio in times where storage really shouldn't be much of a problem seems rather counterproductive.

Re:You'd think

[ganjadude]

That video surveillance would be part of the mandate. you would also think they would have the data sent over a satellite signal and stored at a remote location as to make sure even if the box is damaged the data would be stored where it is reachable

Re:You'd think

[T-Bone-T]

Here are two reasons not to have cameras:
1. They are expensive and often can't be easily installed without major modifications.
2. What good is a camera in the cockpit going to do? It won't be able to see outside(even if it could, you'd still see what the pilots saw, which obviously didn't help them) and it probably won't be able to read the guages. You end up with a video of the pilots doing what the other recorders already said they were doing.

Re:You'd think

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you knew how many of these things recorded the pilot's last B.J.

Re:You'd think

[Rakishi]

even if it could, you'd still see what the pilots saw, which obviously didn't help them Why even bother having a black box at all, obviously none of the information it records helped the pilots in any way it can't be of much user to anyone else either?

Yeah, months of analysis by hundreds of people won't find anything more than do a couple of people with 10 seconds to think...

Re:You'd think

[afidel]

Actually with modern tech shouldn't both boxes be recording BOTH sets of data so recovering one of the two gets you all the facts? It's not like a couple hours of voice and telemetry data would require a lot of flash storage!

Re:You'd think

[T-Bone-T]

What I mean is that it would only serve to say it was indeed sunny, cloudy or dark, information that is much more cheaply learned by other means, like the time or pilot comments.

Re:You'd think

[Dun Malg]

I'd like to know what happened in the cockpit of United 93 on 911, the audio recordings didn't make it clear. Eh. No point in doing it now. Those hijackings were a supreme anomaly, the first and last of their kind. United 93 was basically proof of that. It took only minutes for the passengers to hear about the other planes and decide to abandon the previously standard hijacking strategy of "cooperate and wait till it's over" and adopt the current one of "attack the bastards and beat the crap out of them" (see the Richard Reid "shoebomber" incident).

Re:You'd think

[Dun Malg]

even if it could, you'd still see what the pilots saw, which obviously didn't help them Why even bother having a black box at all, obviously none of the information it records helped the pilots in any way it can't be of much user to anyone else either? You're missing the point. We're talking about a camera vs no camera. Two scenarios:
No Camera
CVR: pilot-"Fire in engine number one. Shutting engine one down."
FDR: Cockpit switch is thrown shutting down engine number TWO
FAA investigator: "Why did he shut off the wrong engine?"

WITH Camera (same as above from CVR and FDR)
Video shows pilot flipping the switch to shut off engine TWO

FAA investigator: "Why did he shut off the wrong engine?"

Seriously, what could they possibly point the camera at that would give them one iota more useful information?

Re:You'd think

[Dun Malg]

you would also think they would have the data sent over a satellite signal and stored at a remote location as to make sure even if the box is damaged the data would be stored where it is reachable OK, now think like an engineer instead of a layperson and take scale into account. An average of 2600 planes in the air at any given time for the entire year of 2006... 22.8 million flight hours. Which magic satellite constellation and ground receiving array should they use with that sort of bandwidth?

If they want

[amRadioHed]

more data from crashes it seems to me that the obvious solution would be to just ease up on aircraft maintenance requirements. Leave it to the government to always pick the hard way.

Re:If they want

[jd]

One airline was recently busted for ignoring those regulations for many years. The airlines are clearly doing their best to supply the data regardless.

Re:If they want

[darkwhite]

Amusingly enough, Southwest (the airline busted) remains one of the safest airlines in the world, with 0 crashes for 15 million commercial flights flown.

Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Khyber]

You drop any solid state device hard enough and it'll fail due to stress fractures in the silicon.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Stormwatch]

Agree. Break the magnetic tape, you can still put it together with a bit of adhesive tape. Break a flash memory, you have worthless pieces of silicon.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[AresTheImpaler]

I might be wrong, but the point is.. a SSD doesnt have any moving parts that will be "move" in an unwanted fashion once the airplane or just the blackbox is hit. This is specially true for all the vibrations that would go thru blackbox material. The black box itself is supposedly there to protect the disk and other instruments from a direct hit, but vibrations will still go thru.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Khyber]

The point is that those vibrations you mention would destroy the solid state storage, thus rendering the data absolutely useless and null. True that tape drive motors would be severely affected unless the whole unit had a gyro stabilizer (which I think some models do) but solid state would shatter upon impact. You rarely find working electronic devices after a plane crash, except for military ones.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Detritus]

Package it properly and it can survive almost anything. The military has been using proximity fuses in artillery shells since World War II.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[AresTheImpaler]

no, those vibrations would not destroy teh solid state storage. a direct hit that would shatter, bend or deform it physically would. At the other hand, moving parts become unreliable with vibrations.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[the pickle]

That's true, but silicon is at least an order of magnitude stronger than magnetic tape, which is fairly notoriously fragile. It's a minor miracle that the recorders survive serious crashes in a usable condition as often as they do.

Any crash that would fracture silicon chips would leave pretty much nothing at all of the airplane or magnetic tape-based FDR/CVR units, so I see this as a general win.

p

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[T-Bone-T]

When something vibrates, the whole object becomes moving parts. That's what vibration is, material in an object moving in a regular fashion. Therefore, strong enough vibration in a device that relies on everything always being in the correct place will destroy it.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[lostguru]

Except in a proximity fuse it only has to work once, and if it doesn't work it blows up anyway when it hits something. Not exactly a good comparison.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Why is it a bad comparison? The black box only has to work once, and if the black box doesn't work the airplane blows up anyway. Seems like it's the same thing.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Eivind]

These things are tested, severly.

They are shot from air-cannons and hit concrete-walls at 900mph. They have sharp, heavy objects dropped on them from large heigths. They are soaked in gasoline and set on fire, they are immersed in sea-water pressurised to the level you'd have a thousands of feet.

Contrary to your claims, solid-state storage is actually able to pass these tests. The lack of moving parts make it much easier to armor the thing. It is -quite- hard to physically shatter a solid-state chip that is encased in 3 inches of elastic but hard epoxy, which is again inside of a solid steel shell. Embedding a working electric motor and tape-reel in epoxy isn't quite so simple...

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Eivind]

True. But "hard enough" is subject to the packaging. Package a chip in 3 inches of elastic-but-hard epoxy, and package that clumb of epoxy in half an inch of stainless steel, and you'll find that the "hard enough" dropping, needed to fracture the silicon, is much MUCH more than the terminal velocity of same (i.e. it'll likely survive a freefall from ANY height)

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[afidel]

Yep, every time one of these types of conversations happens I point to this story. If a CF card can survive having a building collapse on it with just the protection of a commercial camera around it then I think that something engineered to survive should have no problems.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[BradleyUffner]

You're right, they never thought of any of this, or tested it at all before issuing this requirement. It's a good thing you were here to let them know.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[meatmanek]

"Except for military ones" is the important phrase there.
If manufacturers are capable of making plane crash-proof electronic devices for the military, then they can certainly make plane crash-proof electronic devices for the FAA.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[CharlieG]

You don't even have to go that far - honest

I used to (15 years or so ago) be in charge of "Environmental testing" for a small Military contractor. It's really NOT that hard to keep electronics together in one piece. I NEVER saw a chip fail. I did see one or 2 ripped loose off the PWB (Circuit board). I've seen whole assemblies ripped loose and thrown across the room (why you make sure you are NOT down range of a "Naval lightweight shock" test)

But I've never seen a cip fail to the point that if you re-connected it into a circuit, it wouldn't work - well, yeah, I have - the whole unit under test caught on fire, and burned, but...

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[darkwhite]

A solid state device can be protected against almost all of the severe vibrations encountered in a plane crash by proper padding. Other types of damage are taken care of by the armor around the box. There's nothing about SSDs that is less robust to damage than tape recorders or disk drives.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Discoflamingo13]

It's not the same thing. An artillery shell spends the majority of its life in storage until one day it gets pulled out of storage, transported to the field, and blown up. A black box has to be installed on an aircraft (full of moisture, vibration, and temperature extremes) and work continuously until the plane crashes or its service life is exceeded (several years), whichever happens first. Storage environments are easier to design for.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Profane MuthaFucka]

But they're both designed to blow up, and they both will do that if the proximity fuse or the black box fail, right?

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Khyber]

You may not reach terminal velocity, but a blackbox is located in the cockpit. What about the tons of metal coming in behind it after the crash? A good sharp fragment of metal could impale the device and that's the end of it.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[thatnerdguy]

Negative again! Having the black box fail will not cause an aircraft to blow up, it will simply land and not be permitted to fly until it has a functional black box.

Since when are aircraft designed to blow up?

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[ryanov]

They're in the tail, which has been repeated many times.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Profane MuthaFucka]

That's what I said. The plane will blow up as designed even if the trigger in the black box is broken. That's why airplanes are so awesome.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[thatnerdguy]

In the Wikipedia article someone else mentioned, it states:

The device's shroud is usually painted bright orange and generally located in the tail section of the aircraft.

(Emphasis mine)
The planes I've seen all have it in the tail. Maybe aircraft designers thought of that as well!

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Eivind]

Actually, Fligth-Data-Recorders are generally placed in the tail-section of aircraft because that is the placement with the highest chance of successful recovery, and crash-survival.

But even if it wasn't, a pierce-test is part of the testing-procedure these things need to survive to be approved. They have a heavy, sharp metal-spear dropped on them from considerable heigth, and need to work afterwards.

Also, most of the metal in an aircraft is ligthweigth aluminum. It is strong for its mass, but it is not very hard. It is -quite- difficult to pierce half-inch thick stainless steel with a piece of aluminum, even if you deliberately try.

Why even use a hard drive?

[Monev]

Couldn't they just stream plane data to some off site center? Seems like a better use for in flight internet technology.

Re:Why even use a hard drive?

[petermgreen]

I don't think they ever used hard drives. Afaict they went straight from tape to flash.

The big problem I see with streaming the data off is keeping it working under adverse conditions. Afaict in a large proportion of crashes some kind of adverse weather conditions or unusually low flight or power failures or other things that are likely to screw up communications are involved.

Upgrades needed.

[engagebot]

I must first qualify this post by saying that I work at the L3 Aviation Recorders facility that builds all the black boxes. What people dont realize is that we dont just build the flight recorders, but every flight recorder has to come back to this facility to be taken apart and read too. You don't even know how many *old, old* flight recorders come in all the time from retired aircraft or downed aircraft, whatever. Some of the flight recorders out there in the wild are way way behind the new stuff that we're putting in aircraft being built now.

Re:Upgrades needed.

[LynnwoodRooster]

I used to work at Sundstrand Data Control way back in the day (yes, dating myself). I can still remember repacking the foil recorders - nothing like a few thousand feet of razor-tape! But man was it reliable, and pretty much impervious to heat, cold, or vibration. Only penetration would affect it.

We should try to find a way to built the plane out

[Joe The Dragon]

We should try to find a way to built the plane out of the stuff that the black box is made from.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[CrazyJim1]

How did you get modded insightful instead of funny?

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[bluefoxlucid]

Don't be stupid. We build planes from thin pressed light-weight metals, while the black box uses heavy steel casing several inches thick. You think a 4 billion ton plane can get itself off the ground? No engine would accelerate it, much less fast enough.

Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[teamhasnoi]

to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted.

9 / 11? Odd arbitrary range of numbers.

Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[shadow42]

They didn't mention in the article that the boxes have to weigh less than 42 pounds.

Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[AJWM]

Would 10 +/- 1 make it clearer?

Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[CannonballHead]

Furthermore, it should be "9 to 11" or "nine to eleven" not "nine to 11." Apparently, news for nerds needn't be in decent English.

Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[ceroklis]

Woosh!

Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[Eivind]

Not really. That would imply that a device was out-of-spec if it somehow managed to record for MORE than 11 minutes without being supplied external power. I see no sensible reason for such a prohibition.

Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[AJWM]

If the storage is limited -- which it is -- you don't want it to keep recording after the crash and risk losing (overwriting) the pre-crash data. Yes the 10 minutes +/- 10% may be arbitrary, but they have to pick a number.

If the external power dies more than ten minutes before the crash, you have a problem, but the fact that the power died and what led up to that may be a clue. (Large aircraft will typically have a small wind turbine generator that will deploy to provide power in the case of total engine failure.)

Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[Eivind]

That's a good point, but in that case, wouldn't it be more sensible to specify it in terms of total storage-capacity ?

A device with capacity for 3 hours of data may not want to record for more than 10 minutes after a powerloss, but it makes little sense to restrict the recording to a max of 11 minutes after powerloss if a better device has capacity for 48 hours of data. (in that case recording for say 1-2 hours after powerloss is more likely to be optimal)

"Devices should be capable of continuing recording for atleast 10 minutes without external power. Devices should not write to more than 10% of internal storage-capacity without being supplied external power."

Strict Laws

[MattPat]

Of course, if your backup power source can only last for 8 minutes and 59 seconds, you are in flagrant violation of the law.

Re:Strict Laws

[aiht]

Or 11 minutes and 1 second, for that matter.
Why is there an upper limit to this range?

Re:Strict Laws

[wasted]

Or 11 minutes and 1 second, for that matter.
Why is there an upper limit to this range?

So the recorder does not record much data from after the crash over data from before the crash.

Re:Strict Laws

[aiht]

Ooh! Good point *mod self down*

Re:Strict Laws

[lachlan76]

As well as what the other guy said, it could be that they wanted a minimum value of 10m +/- 1m---it's not unusual for uncertainties to be quoted that way, after all.

Re:Strict Laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if your backup power source can only last for 8 minutes and 59 seconds, you are in flagrant violation of the law.

How else do you want laws? Without clear boundaries? Maybe you want it like D&D? If you power lasts less than 9 minutes, compute the number of seconds you are short (8:59 -> 1 second short). Roll a d20, if your roll is larger than the number of short seconds, you're ok, otherwise you've violated the law.

No, clear precise laws are best. However, when it comes the punishment, the amount of violation should come into play. Zero tolerance, where they use the maximum penalty for minor infractions is stupid.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[simontek2]

Two words: Spruce Goose.

Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip? Why is the technology limited to making a recording crash-proof?

They should keep the crash-proof boxes, for events that stop the streaing before the recorder stops. But why should they have to always wait to investigate the data until after a little box, that could have been itself destroyed in the massive crash, be found amidst all the debris, scattered sometimes across dozens of miles of often inaccessible terrain? If the data is streamed live, they might also find the box sooner, if the box has a GPS that continues streaming after the box has landed somewhere.

This seems elementary. Why not do it already, now that both air flight and radio have been with us for over a century?

Re:Realtime Streaming

[MichaelSmith]

Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip? Why is the technology limited to making a recording crash-proof?

One reason is that the lead time for new communication protocols and applications in aviation is measured in decades. Remember that all aircraft still report 12 bit mode 3a identifiers which have to be allocated before use because there aren't enough to go around, and use totally spoofable VHF AM radio transceivers.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Waffle Iron]

Well, the airlines were all set to do this. But when they checked the per-minute rates on the back of their Airfone handsets, they realized that keeping a call open for the duration of each flight would bankrupt them.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Detritus]

For one thing, it would be horrendously expensive to develop and deploy a network of satellites and ground stations capable of handling a high-speed data feed from every commercial aircraft that's in operation. Black boxes are much more cost effective and reliable. They work in all weather and are insensitive to aspect ratios and loss of attitude control.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, but that attitude is stupid when lives and $billions are at stake.

Satellite phones are already decades-old tech. Something specific has to be holding them back. Or the aviation industry and the government that controls it are as immensely stupid at everything as they always appear to be.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[evilviper]

Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip?

Because it would be absolutely horrendously expensive, terribly unreliable, and almost completely useless. There are huge, huge numbers of glitch-free flights every day (but they all have to pay for uplinking numerous megabytes of data per hour), and only the very tiniest fraction of aircraft ever need that flight data examined.

They should keep the crash-proof boxes, for events that stop the streaing before the recorder stops.

Which would be just about every single event that they would possibly WANT to examine.

If the data is streamed live, they might also find the box sooner, if the box has a GPS that continues streaming after the box has landed somewhere.

Black boxes already have locater beacons.

This seems elementary.

That doesn't mean it's useful.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Nefarious Wheel]

The black box should be ejected, or ejectable from the plane at certain acceleration levels if at all possible (accelerations such as those you would experience shortly after your "Hey, what's that sheep doing up in this cloud?" moment). The Lockheed D-21 supersonic drone used to drop the hatch containing spy cameras before landing, so there's build precedent. This would be in addition to filling the entire box with silicon rubber after assembly into it's own little alloy billet and all those other wonders our diseased minds can think of to isolate them from their little moment of hell.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

There's already a satellite network, that handles data. The data doesn't need to be "high speed". The recorders don't record that much data.

I didn't say to get rid of the boxes. I said to keep them. But I said to add some technology that already exists, is already used for telemetry out of harsh environments. And that don't go down with the ship (or at least don't take all their data with them before being read when they go).

BTW, "aspect ratios"? Huh?

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Animats]

Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip?

There are privacy issues. The voice data logs are normally erased after a successful flight.

Many aircraft do in fact send some maintenance data back to HQ over a data link. The current system is 2400 baud, so not much data is sent. Nor is it sent continuously. ARINC charges for receiving that data through their network of ground stations, and the cost per bit for this 1980s technology is quite high.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Detritus]

I should have said "aspect angle".

What's the satellite network that you are referring to? Most remote telemetry applications use burst transmissions to transmit limited amounts of data.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Planes already have had onboard phones in constant connection with the ground. The amount of data we're talking about (10 megabytes per hour is only 2.7KBps, and actual FDRs capture something like 7.5MB:h) is trivial to transmit over such a phone connection. It can of course be buffered for when there are indeed interruptions, all of which is backed up in the local physical recording like before, like I said. But the actual cost of a 5h, or even a 19h phonecall, even at $2:min (so up to $2280) is trivial compared to the other costs of the flight, like fuel, crew salary, even insurance. And of course saving the cost of waiting days to start getting the data after a crash would pay for all the flights recorded without incident in between.

Moreover, most of the events examined in the current recorders happen before the aircraft loses integrity or actually crashes. All that data would be available immediately. It would even be available in realtime, so early warnings could be found sometimes before they became critical, and emergency crews mobilized at the earliest possible moment.

So yes, it is elementary, and much more useful that the current systems.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[MichaelSmith]

Something specific has to be holding them back. Or the aviation industry and the government that controls it are as immensely stupid at everything as they always appear to be.

For a start it is an international system. Aircraft made in Pakistan have to interoperate with ground systems in the US, Canada, Russia, etc. Systems like mode-s and ADS/CPDLC go part of the way to what you want, but their adoption has been slowed by the fact the VHF voice comms are free everywhere and satellite communication costs a lot of money, particularly when you want an aviation grade connection and it has to be on all the time.

You are right, just wait 20 years.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

>One reason is that the lead time for new communication protocols and applications in aviation is measured in decades.

And that is often repeated as though it is a perfectly reasonable thing.

A hardened flash memory device could have massive redundancy in a tiny package, but we still have wire recorders?

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Sure, that's good for the recorder and a few extra seconds at the end. But radio telemetry would reduce the search for the black box to something done while the analysts get right to work on all the data they've already got, without risk of loss.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

>There are privacy issues. The voice data logs are normally erased after a successful flight.

Voice recorders recycle every few minutes. This has been a problem in some investigations where the incident leading to the flight was longer ago than the tape loop.

There are opportunities for aircraft to be outfitted privately with equipment beyond what is mandatory, using much more modern resources. Why don't we hear about any of the aircraft makers adding equipment that is privately developed, far more fault-tolerant than what is required, in *addition* to the standard stuff? Part of the reason is that it is difficult if possible to get approval for any such thing.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

What privacy issues prevent the voice data from being scrambled for transmission, and being deleted when the flight is deemed successful?

And AFAICT, current recorders just record something like 7.5MB:h, which is something like 2.5KBps. There is an entire satellite phone system up, to say nothing of all the other satellite networks available. Why is it necessary to keep the 1980s tech, when we have 2008 tech that would be so much better? Why, when we're upgrading the whole system as the story we're discussion reports, aren't we doing it right?

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

There are several networks that satellite phones use.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[T-Bone-T]

What are you proposing? Take those satellites offline from phone use and use them for airliners? What about the companies that paid for those satellites? Wouldn't they have to buy more satellites? Just because something exists that could meet your needs doesn't mean it is available for your use.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[conscious.pilate]

While not strictly streaming, many "events" are transmitted in real-time via the ACARS network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS You may get a call suggesting you monitor say an oil temp that is still within parameters but has trended up over the last few days. And bye the way, the recording boxes are day-glow orange, all the others are black.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Moridin42]

Right.. because of course we wouldn't have thousands of aircraft in the air at any given time generating traffic against the remote possibility of a problem. And the airlines are rolling in profits with which to pay for your "trivial" thousands of dollars per flight in comm charges.

I also don't see where you'd generate any cost savings by shortening the wait time after a crash. Since the crash already occured. Response teams are going to be in action as soon as possible after the crash regardless. They're going to be collecting debris. The only way I can see any savings from finding the recorder faster or having the streamed data available.. would be if the issue that caused the crash occured frequently enough that we could expect days to make a difference in preventing another crash. Which is possible, I'll grant. But unlikely. So.. your suggestion seems to guard against the rare occurance of an event that can only occur after another rare event.

And all it would cost is millions per day, at least. Assuming, of course, that the current aircraft to ground comm infrastructure could handle the traffic without expansion. If it couldn't, thats an even greater expense.

All of which might be worthwhile if there really are a high percentage of crashes that could've been prevented by staff on the ground correctly diagnosing problems that the pilots are incorrectly diagnosing. So not only would you have to first show me that such a thing would be the case, you'd also have to tell me why the pilots are so poorly trained with respect to inflight emergencies, while the ground staff is so well trained.

And if you want to argue that we could save lives, that may be true. We could also save lives by never putting an aircraft in the sky again. No fliers, no crashes. We don't do this because we, consciously or not, make risk and cost assessments every day, in everything we do.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[jimicus]

Nice idea, but black boxes have one major advantage over other technology.

They work.

And I don't mean that in a flippant way, I mean "they are known to work, are based on technology which is designed to be extremely reliable at every level and are the result of many years of development to keep them this way" - the last two certainly don't apply to any form of wireless communication. A radical change in how they operate would lose a lot of this, and the various aircraft designers, manufacturers and aviation authorities around the world tend to be very nervous about any major departure from known-good design concepts.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

With todays available storage capacities, flight recorders could literally record complete, detailed flight profiles, including video. Solid state is very tough, especially when broken down to sufficiently small and light, non-rigidly interconnected modules, suspended in inert, amortizing fluid inside tough, hermetic, heatproof casing.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Detritus]

Not nearly enough bandwidth. Just the cockpit voice recorder would overwhelm the satellite link.

http://www.seaerospace.com/king/sscvr.htm

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

How does 3x1750Kbps + 3.25Kbps = 8.5Kbps overwhelm anything? BGAN terminals offer 300-400Kbps up, $5K per terminal. $5-10:MB is $19.13-38.25 per hour for voice, to a maximum of $1800:h full continuous bandwidth for 6h transcontinental. That's $114.72-229.44 transcontinental, $363.28-726.56 19h semicircumglobal, max $5.4-10.8K-17.1K/34.2K if they somehow use the full 400Kbps at $5:MB-10:MB for 6 or 19h respectively.

Even if they harden the terminals, that's not going to cost more than $20-30K, if that. Another $20K max to interface it to the fly by wire bus and mics. Transcontinental flights consume that much money's worth of fuel shuttling 210 people NY to LA once.

And that's the most expensive, high quality connections, at small scale consumption rates. I'm sure the airlines could negotiate bulk rates. Or the global industry and governments could buy the defunct Iridium network still hanging around up there, or finally fund Teledesic (or equivalent) now that there's enough traffic to justify the investment. As anchor tenants for a satellite network, they'd have extra capacity to sell as generic networking for all kinds of remote telemetry at sea, at isolated land sites, and in space.

Or they can concentrate on nickel and dimeing us with taxes for searching our shoes, then spend precious hours and days searching for black boxes. FWIW, the black boxes from the 2 9/11/2001 WTC planes "were never found". Maybe there is a competing interest more valuable than reliable telemetry.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Except I didn't say to stop using the onboard recorders. Just to start using something better in addition.

After a decade or so I expect the transmitters will also evolve to be just as reliable. Or we can just keep using the recorders, too, which we probably should anyway.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

The data cost would be at most a couple hundred dollars per flight.

The cost of even a few extra hours - or days, sometimes - of dozens of searchers in remote locations for each of 2 black boxes really outweighs that. Some boxes are never found, like those from the 2 planes that hit the WTC on 9/11/2001. The extra cost of that investigation, less insightful without the actual data, is probably more than all the data would have cost since then, even in simple accountable costs.

And then there's the advantage that realtime telemetry data could be analyzed to detect problems before they go critical. Lives could be saved, to say nothing of the price of a new plane and the recovery/investigation of each lost one.

It's just not that expensive to deploy telemetry for recovery and prevention. The costs of failure are huge. You can see that the risk analysis favors the telemetry. But somehow, people don't even bother to think it through, as you just demonstrated.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Interestingly, ACARS is supposedly to be replaced by the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN). That's probably the platform that could do what I'm describing. Despite all the squawking by these Slashdot "experts" about how it's impossible or too expensive, and the FAA upgrading to something the ATN will seemingly soon obsolete. Which probably means the FAA is insisting on the upgrade now, to ensure the current vendors can peddle their ancient crap well into this century, though the rest of the platform has moved well beyond it.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

I agree. It looks like they're finally upgrading from magnetic plastic tape (like audio cassettes) to Flash, after recently making the jump from wire recorders (1940s technology).

I think the airlines and FAA are too busy covering up huge profits and waste, while the aircraft manufacturers just follow those leads. Technology for crash recovery would emphasize the crashes, which they always hate to acknowledge.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Detritus]

You are going to need considerably more than 8.5 kbps to get the same audio quality as provided by the CVR. I'd figure a minimum of 32 kbps for each voice channel and 64 kbps for the area microphone. That's a total of 160 kbps. You need real digitized audio, not the output of an aggressive vocoder running at a low bit rate.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Anonymous Coward]

But why should they have to always wait to investigate the data until after a little box, that could have been itself destroyed in the massive crash, be found amidst all the debris, scattered sometimes across dozens of miles of often inaccessible terrain? Can you point to an example besides the 2 planes that hit the WTC and TWA 800, where the plane was found but the black box wasn't?

My impression from hearing an interview with a guy who analyzes flight data recorders is that the FDR is almost always found, except in the cases mentioned. Sometimes the data is partially corrupt, but other parts would typically be readable.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Not offhand. But I'm not tracking the industry. The planes that go down at sea probably lose their boxes more frequently. If the WTC boxes are the only ones not found (though somehow the lead hijacker's paper passport was found in the rubble), that points to something more serious than "just" average plane crashes, that's probably worth $billions just to avoid in that one case.

But lost boxes are just the extreme case Just "partially corrupt" is a cost. But mainly the delay in finding them, and the cost of the time spent looking, is expensive. In dollars, in suffering. And, if realtime telemetry can be used to detect problems that can be averted before they go critical, then there's a whole new application even more valuable than the accounting job that's currently worth so much, but so little is spent to recover its full value.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

The CVR says 3x3500Hz + 1x6500Hz. Maybe it needs double what I estimated, for Nyquist sampling. Of course, VBR and compression would reduce the bandwidth.

Even at 10x the cost, $1200 extra per transcontinental flight (for which the fuel costs $400 per passenger) isn't very much. And the rates I quoted were for individual retail, not volume like all air traffic.

These are nickel and dime arguments. The benefit of realtime telemetry can be valued at $millions per obviated expedition to recover the boxes, and if it's analyzed in realtime for incipient faults, $billions in avoided crashes. I'd think the insurance corps alone would want to fund it.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[KJE]

Here's a company that's doing just that.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

I just hope that their patent isn't broader than their specific technology doing it. And that their tech isn't just connecting to existing standard satellite tech.

Not just because of general patent ethics. But also because it looks like their only taker is Pakistan's airline. If they can make Pakistan's airlines safe, while denying that safety to American (and other) airlines, then the terrorists who attacked the US (who live in Pakistan, are protected by its government, and probably fly in Pakistan's planes) will have won.

It's a Canadian patent, but that can have its effect globally under WTO. And would be that much more a thorn in the US' side.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Moridin42]

I know this is slashdot, and yet it still annoys me that you don't seem to read.

Your data cost seems to keep coming down. First you claim a couple thousand. Now you're down to a couple of hundred.

I'm also supposed to take it on faith that there are savings in not needing to search for hours or days. Why? Those people are going to be out there searching, regardless. It isn't like they find the recorders and go home.

You also want to tell me that telemetry could detect problems before they go critical. But neglect to tell me why we would need telemetry to solve this problem. If the instruments are faulty, the data they transmit is going to be just as faulty as the data being displayed to the pilots. If they aren't faulty, why are the ground staff so much better at diagnosing the problem than the pilots? Not to mention that the number of ground staff that would have to be employed to keep an eye on all the data for flights in the air. Costly. If we're automating that portion, why do we need a ground device to do the analysis?

Throwing "lives could be saved" at me doesn't make it a reasonable suggestion by any means. And I already told you how to save lives, and the costs of planes, and the cost of recovery and investigation. Yet I don't think anybody is ready to go with it. You know.. never fly another plane? Yeah. It works. Has no point of failure. It is even, monetarily speaking, free.

I can see that you don't believe it is expensive to deploy telemetry. I don't necessarily agree. Satellites aren't cheap, and aren't cheap to launch. Ground stations are cheaper, but you need more of them. Which makes that also not cheap. Not to mention that the system would need to be maintained. And no, you can't just displace traffic on already existing systems. For any individual flight, the data requirements may be small. But we don't have a small number of flights in the air and that isn't a trivial amount of data.

I can also see that you believe the costs of failure are huge. But you're looking at the costs of failure as lives lost and plane replacement for each crash, as far as I can tell. Which is a gross overstatement of the failure costs. A crashed plane isn't a cost of not using telemetry. Its a cost of aviation. Telemetry is only of a benefit if the telemetry would've prevented the loss. That is to say that if a crash occurs, and would've even with telemetry, it wasn't of any benefit. You haven't provided a methodology for making the estimate of how frequently it would be useful. If I provide my own, I just don't see that many, perhaps none, of the crashes as being preventable just because the aircraft was transmitting its flight data. Meaning that telemetry is constantly an expense (and larger than you seem to believe) with no guarantee of ever being a benefit.

If I compare all of the benefits of an option, and neglect to include all the costs of that option, against all of the costs and more of not utilizing that option.. I'm sure the analysis comes out in favor. I am also equally sure that it was a pointless exercise.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

You're annoyed because you can't tell the difference between the generously conservative estimate I first made of $2:h from the specific respearch I linked to in the later post that showed the amount would be much lower.

But hey, you can't even understand that if people don't have to search a remote area for black boxes, they can spend less time in total searching for everything they're searching for.

You don't care that lives would be saved. You won't admit that even a single crashed jet would be worth many millions of dollars. You insist that your excluded middle strawman about not flying is some kind of alternative argument.

You're not even bothering to think, much less read. It's a good thing people actually deploying aircraft remote telemetry aren't as unqualified to comment as you are. Enjoy your Slashdot. It's just about your speed.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

I ran down just how cheap the bandwidth would be. Even $5:min for a 6h flight is only $1800, which is nothing compared to, say, the cost of circling for an extra 5 minutes while the gate is busy, which happens all day long.

The black boxes take a long time to find, even using their current beacons. Adding GPS would make it easier, reduce cost and increase reliability.

That's what engineering is about. It's not some magic solution. It's updating the tech to use new tech that's now cheap and reliable to increase the reliability and cheapness of the overall system.

But not on Slashdot. On Slashdot, engineering is what you eat for breakfast with your spam.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Moridin42]

No.. As I said, I'm annoyed that you didn't bother to read. But.. not surprisingly, you didn't bother to do so, a second time.

You're still going on about the search for black boxes, acting as if you find the black box and go home. Search teams would only spend less time searching if the black box is the last thing found. So.. if thats the case, say so. At this point, though, don't expect me to just take you at your word. You haven't exactly built a lot of credibility with me from the posts on this subject that I've read.

I can tell the difference between what you stated as costs, and what you completely ignored as costs.

Apparently you don't understand that lives can always be saved. If we didn't do thousands of the things that we do, lots of lives could be saved. And yet we do them. Because we make risk and cost assessments. Which was the whole point of saying that not flying would save a lot of lives and a lot of money on replacing downed aircraft and figuring out what went wrong with them. Its all true, and yet we recklessly disregard that fact, because we want to fly. We want to fly so much that we risk crashing and dying to do it. This isn't a difficult concept. It isn't a strawman. Its the real conclusion to your "but lives can be saved!" line. Lives can always be saved. And whether or not you want to admit it, people all over the world put a price on life. Every day. Every time they decide to do something. Saving lives is well and good. But its costly.

If you want to spout that your costs are complete, which they aren't, you can. It doesn't mean that telemetry is worthwhile. Not once have I said that I don't care about lives being saved. Nor have I ever attempted to say that a crashed jet is cheap. But thanks for trying to put words in my mouth.

If you wanted to be believed, you'd be here telling me just how frequently telemetry could prevent a crash. Which I notice you haven't addressed, and neither does your nice pretty brochure link. Said link, I'll note, reads like propaganda from a company trying to sell you something. Not surprising since thats exactly what it is. Crashes that telemetry could prevent are the only benefit. Not all crashes are going to be preventable. Crashes are a cost of aviation. So yes, in order to push your viewpoint, you really do have to state just how many crashes you believe are preventable and why.

You also didn't bother to tell me how, if the instrumentation is faulty, the telemetry is going to be useful. If the pilots have bad data to make decisions with, why does the remote analysis have good data? If both pilots and remote analysis have good data, why is the remote analysis better? Both are real questions that really do need to be answered. In the first case, it would be beneficial to have telemetry. And yet, the problem (pilots with bad data) should be corrected. In doing so, you'd remove the telemetry benefit. If the second case isn't true, then telemetry isn't doing anything for us.

What I'm not bothering to do is to present an alternative method of improving aviation safety. I haven't got one. What I am doing, and have done previously, is state why your posts on the subject are lacking. I have done reading, and I've thought about it. I haven't said anything about the existance of benefits from telemetry, although I have said some about whether it would be worthwhile. I'm not an aeronautical engineer, so I could be wrong. I do, however, know that you can't compare the complete benefits of telemetry against a portion of the costs to come up with a skewed net benefit and make a meaningful decision. All of which, you have done. But yes.. tell me again I haven't read, haven't thought. Attack me (unfounded, even) as a person, rather than defend your position.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Dun Malg]

The CVR says 3x3500Hz + 1x6500Hz. Maybe it needs double what I estimated, for Nyquist sampling. Of course, VBR and compression would reduce the bandwidth. Yes, the ignorant always have what they think is an easy solution. You've clearly never tried to get a stationary mobile data terminal to link up to a satellite, much less a mobile one, much less 4500 mobile ones simultaneously (peak airborne traffic in the US alone). You've clearly also never read the pilots' union contract, which requires not just strict confidentiality of CVR recordings, but actually prohibits the accessing CVR tapes except in the event of an accident. No, go head, handwave the real technical a legal barriers to such a system and blame it on a conspiracy, like you usually do.

These are nickel and dime arguments. The benefit of realtime telemetry can be valued at $millions per obviated expedition to recover the boxes, You're nuts. The price of retrofitting and maintaining a realtime data network would be far more expensive than a thousand black box recoveries.

and if it's analyzed in realtime for incipient faults, $billions in avoided crashes. I'd think the insurance corps alone would want to fund it. Now I know you've lost your mind. I daresay you can't cite a single example of where any lives or any noteworthy amount of money could have been saved if only the black box data from a particular crash had been recovered sooner.

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby]

Why don't you just stick the company actually doing this right up your obnoxious ass?

Requires massive acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do some research first. "Currently, EUROCAE specifies that a recorder must be able to withstand an acceleration of 3400 g (33 km/s) for 6.5 milliseconds." To test the armor and memory, manufacturers test them by firing them out of a calibrated cannon (compressed air, not gunpowder) into a hard surface.

They also survive crush tests, penetration tests (IIRC, 1/4" steel dowel on a 500lb weight dropped 10' on all six faces), short term high intensity heat (propane flame "goosed" with oxygen to make it hot enough), long term moderate (600^C?) heat soak, and pressurized seawater immersion (I forgot the equivalent depth, way further than I would care to dive).

On the Wikipedia pictures, the circular/semi-circular painted part is the armor (with the rectangular versions, the armor is inside the shell). The silvery cylinder on the near end is an underwater locating beacon "pinger".

A magnetic media recorder would not survive what the solid state recorders survive. The old metal foil scribe recorders would probably survive but don't record many signals nor very accurately.

Re:You almost make it sound fair.

[Anonymous Coward]

I fear that Slashdot doesn't have the correct type of moderation for this comment. -1 Troll somewhat gets the idea of this post, but it misses the essence. -1 Stupid might be better as well as -1 Tinfoil Hat.

Little known issue with flash memory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash memory won't write under high G (about 3) situations. Hope nothing exciting happens in those last critical seconds. Don't believe me? Request the mil-spec qualifications from your favorite flash memory manufacturer.

Re:Little known issue with flash memory.

[Anonymous Coward]

BS. Put your flash drive on a USB extension and whip it around while writing. If that spec actually exists, they just want you to pay more for certification.

Typical Bush tricks

[Gorimek]

Here they go again. More surveillance in the name of "security".

WAKE UP AMERICA!!

Re:Typical Bush tricks

[calebt3]

Read the article again. What is oppressive about lengthening the duration of recorded cockpit coversation, using flash rather than tape drives, and having an internal power supply?

Re:Typical Bush tricks

[Gorimek]

I was just trying to make a joke. Judging by the moderation and your comment, it didn't work. Can't strike gold every time.

Finally

[ceroklis]

This was one of the recommendations issued by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada following the crash of Swissair Flight 111. I'm glad they finally implemented that. To recap: the flight recorders in that flight lost power 6 minutes before impact, which necessitated a very costly reconstruction of a portion of the aircraft.

In any case I never understood why these recorders weren't required to have a battery backup from the beginning. Seems pretty idiotic since accidents involving loss of power are not hard to imagine. Furthermore devices like card access systems and elevators have had battery backups for years.

Re:Finally

[Detritus]

It's one more thing that can fail, requires regular maintenance, creates new hazards, and adds weight.

Re:Finally

[lawrencebillson]

The original blackbox recorders (the tape based ones) used to use an endless spool of tape; it would record for around thirty minutes before overwriting itself. By not having a battery backup, the tape would stop as the plane hits the ground.

It's not a perfect system. I recall hearing of a few crashes that didn't interrupt power to the blackbox and all of the relevant data was overwritten with fresher post crash stuff.... They probably got a whole bunch of firemen swearing or whatnot.

Re:Finally

[ryanov]

I was thinking of this myself, when I was reading about TWA flight 800 the other day. Apparently the black boxes stopped recording almost immediately, since power was lost. I thought about it a little harder and figured, well, the chances of there being anything to record if the rest of the airplane has no power might be pretty low. If the instruments for recording are actually IN the box though, and not just recording data sent from the rest of the plane, I suppose it would be possible.

Neat to see them mandate something I was just thinking about this week though.

Re:Loss of Reliability

[Nullav]

I'm assuming they're referring to how tape degrades over time with 'loss of reliability'. However, I am a bit confused as to how solid-state storage is much better in this situation, since torn tape can still be played while it would be somewhat difficult to recover from a trashed flash chip. (Though I'm sure this could be solved quite easily by recording to several SSDs at once.)

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[stevedmc]

What do you think gets the space shuttle off the ground? It can be put up in the air, but with a stronger engine.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[evilviper]

We should try to find a way to built the plane out of the stuff that the black box is made from.

Better yet, try to find a way to make humans out of stuff that can withstand a 900 MPH crash...

Summary forgot an important detail

[the pickle]

From TFA:

"These provisions affect new aircraft manufactured after March 7, 2010."

This won't affect a single new aircraft for two years unless Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, and Embraer decide to do it on their own, and it does NOT apply to the existing fleet of transport category aircraft at all (i.e., retrofits are not required).

p

Re:Summary forgot an important detail

[T-Bone-T]

If the date of manufacture is the day the aircraft rolls off the assembly line, I'd say this will affect many aircraft.

Re:Summary forgot an important detail

[kvap]

Retrofits *are* required starting 2 years later (07-Mar-2012).

(per this page: http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/bizav/1068-full.html#197351)

Re:Summary forgot an important detail

[susano_otter]

Summaries can't include all the details; if they did, they'd be the full article, and we'd have to summarize the summary.

What makes you think this particular detail is important enough to be included in the summary?

Re:Summary forgot an important detail

[the pickle]

Retrofits *are* required starting 2 years later

Right you are, in certain circumstances, although AvWeb (and the original article) got the magnetic tape and retrofit parts wrong too, which is why this confused the heck out of me.

http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/rulemaking/recently_published/media/23532.DOC

is the actual rule, which explicitly does *not* ban magnetic tape. To wit, "[t]he replacement of magnetic tape flight recorders was not proposed in the NPRM and represents a significant change that is beyond the scope of the rulemaking."

The FAA also goes on to say:

Smiths [Aerospace] also proposed language that would specifically prohibit the use of magnetic tape recorders, since it was the agency's stated intent in the NPRM.

While an interesting technical consideration, the FAA did not propose a change to the TSO standard (which is based on ED-56) in the NPRM, and the process for changing TSOs is separate and complex. We also believe that a requirement for two hours of recording time is enough to eliminate the use of magnetic tape recorders for those aircraft subject to the requirement...No change to the 2-hour recording duration has been made in the final rule based on these comments.

Nowhere in the final rule do they ban magnetic tapes, although it does appear that all aircraft operating under 14 CFR Part 121 (i.e., scheduled airlines) in the US will be required to have a CVR capable of recording two hours of audio by 2012. (A lot of them already are, by the way.)

p

Question: why just record?

[martyb]

Here's a question that's been gnawing at me for a while... why is the "black box" just a recorder? I'd think of this question every time I heard that there's been an accident and the black box had not been found. OR, that they found the box but it was too badly damaged to make out all the data. Is this still a problem?

If a black box (BB) senses an anomalous event, why couldn't it transmit a [compressed] copy of the recorded data? Or, even better, besides recording it all, transmit all the data all the time. Maybe not to the airline, but to you at L3 Aviation Recorders, perhaps? With the recent talk about providing in-flight internet access, I could see this happening sooner or later.

Without internet access, just have a reserved frequency to transmit on. If transmit time becomes an issue, use multiple frequencies and transmit on each one of them in parallel.

I can't imagine I'm the first to think of this, so what am I missing here? Could it be it is only now that we could conceivably do this?

Re:Question: why just record?

[ruinevil]

Quote One thing I remember from an ACM meeting was that radio transmissions take a lot of power compared to getting data and storing to memory. This was from team who used to check the soil moisture and temperature around campus using stakes filled with a battery for some purpose or other. So the blackbox would need a lot more power to survive those 9 to 11 minutes, while transmitting voices to where ever. You can't get all the radio waves from every American plane to Florida anyways. You'd need some powerful transmitters.

Re:Question: why just record?

[jd]

Transmitting all of the data at time of accident would be problematic, but I can't see an objection to the black box retaining abnormal data and transmitting that when landing or taking off. It might be a useful early-warning to prevent accidents in the first place, or perhaps give additional information helpful to investigators on where stresses or abnormalities aren't.

Re:Question: why just record?

[AB3A]

It doesn't transmit such signals for several reasons. First, there may not be anybody listening. You have to point this thing at an orbital satellite for any reliability. Even then, communications reliability can still be screwed up by a good sized solar storm.

Second, if there is airframe damage (like the Aloha 737) you could easily lose the connection to an antenna.

Third, airline pilot unions have a special agreement that says that cockpit conversations are confidential except in an accident. Further, the actual cockpit voice recorder audio is kept confidential. They don't want to upset the families of the victims. That's why you only see transcripts of their last words.

Finally, with all the airliners out there transmitting continuously, it would chew up a lot of bandwidth. Somebody has to pay for it.

Re:Question: why just record?

[Starker_Kull]

Actually, something very similiar to that is already done at many airlines. The data is downloaded at various intervals, and examined for any 'unusual' events - the pilots involved are contacted in a 'non-jeopardy' fashion and asked to explain why something occurred. It has already led to significant improvements in maintainance replacements, and highlighted a few non-optimal procedures that tend to put a crew in a worse place than they started.

The key is that it is non-jeopardy, otherwise the pilots wouldn't speak candidly about the situation and what led them into it, and you might get little or no clue as to what was actually occurring. We call it FOQA, and I'm sure various others have thier own names...

Re:Question: why just record?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Kind of like Morbidity and Mortality discussions in Medical settings; you have to be free to discuss screwups to learn from them, without fear of reprisal.

Re:Question: why just record?

[ivan256]

Cell phones can transmit for hours with a tiny battery. These things can have over 20lbs of battery in them. You could transmit at fairly high power for days. The hard bit would be the system of receivers.

FAA Looking To Make Money From Fines

[AO]

I think the real reason for the new rules is to increase the money from fines.

From TFA
 

* By January 1, 2005, retrofit all airplanes that are required to carry a cockpit and data recorder with a system that is capable of recording the last two hours of audio; and is fitted with a 10 minute independent power source that is located with the device and that automatically engages and provides 10 minutes of operation whenever power to the recorder ceases, either by normal shutdown or by a loss of power to the bus.

* Require all aircraft manufactured after January 1, 2003, that are required to carry a cockpit and data recorder be equipped with two combination cockpit voice and data recording systems. One system should be located as close to the cockpit as practicable and the other as far aft as practicable. Both recording systems should be capable of recording all mandatory data parameters covering the previous 25 hours of operation and all cockpit audio and controller pilot datalink communications for the previous two hours of operation. The system located near the cockpit should be provided with an independent power source that engages automatically and provides 10 minutes of operation whenever normal aircraft power ceases. The aft system should be powered by the bus that provides the maximum reliability for operation without jeopardizing service to essential or emergency loads. The system near the cockpit should be powered by the bus that provides the second highest reliability for operation without jeopardizing service to essential or emergency loads.

As I recall, this is 2008, all year long.

But they *do* fail

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Black boxes often do fail.

It's a lot easier to reenforce a small robust item than a large fragile one. Smaller is inherently stronger because they have less stresses due to acceleration etc. F= m a

A small solidstate recorder with some accelerometers etc could likely be made a lot cheaper, smaller and tougher than the monsters of today.

Re:But they *do* fail

[Anonymous Coward]

What evidence do you have that black boxes frequently fail?

Cockpit Conversation

[PPH]

(With apologies to Gary Larson)

First Officer: "Oh No! The fuel warning light is on! We're all going to die!!!"

Captain: "You idiot. That's the public address system light, not the fuel light."

Yeah, good luck with that.

[Mr. Roadkill]

Voice recorders must also use solid state technology instead of magnetic tape, which is vulnerable to damage and loss of reliability

Okay. Good luck with splicing together itty bitty fragments of flash memory chips. Good luck with pulling information out of flash memory chips that have been under a couple of miles of salt water, and had the briny deep seep in between the legs and the epoxy and into their inner goodness. I hope they've got all kinds of grinding machines designed to allow them to separate individual chips off busted boards and prepare them for reliable connection to special test jigs, because the chance of them being able to play back from a flight recorder that's just fallen from 40,000 feet must be pretty slim.

I'm not saying you couldn't build a solid-state flight recorder that could survive most conceivable crashes, but surely tape and solid-state should be viewed as complementary technologies - current, perhaps improved magnetic recorders for the current timeframes (so you've got at least the last half hour on something you can piece together and pull an analog signal off, if need be) and the whole flight on an ever-improving series of solid-state recorders that would have to consider mil-spec as a starting point for where they need to head.

Re:Yeah, good luck with that.

[DerekLyons]

Okay. Good luck with splicing together itty bitty fragments of flash memory chips.

And you think the FAA doesn't know the potential problems and hasn't been working on them for years? These devices have been under development for around thirty years and have been commercially available (and certified by the FAA) for over a decade now.
 
The FAA didn't just make this decision out of the blue you know.

Re:Yeah, good luck with that.

[greyhueofdoubt]

Pot the entire thing in a block of hard wax. You have support, insulation, and shock absorption. The phase change of the wax from solid to liquid will absorb a great deal of heat during a fire. Make the box out of two layers of .090" 2024 T-3 or something, and have expanded foam in between the layers.

If the electronics in artillery shells can withstand the (hundreds of?) thousands of G's placed on them during launch, then I'm pretty sure this box will do just fine.

-b

black bochs upgrade

[rice_burners_suck]

i got an idea for a black box upgrade. they say the black box can survive any crash. the upgrade is: build the whole fscking plane that way!

Re:black bochs upgrade

[Faylone]

I'd wondered that until a few minutes ago, too. After a quick google search, the answer turns out to be that they'd be far too heavy. Also of note is that they DON'T just survive any crash, even with all the precautions, they can STILL get destroyed. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_001.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_data_recorder have more info

cockpit video

[blitz487]

They'd do even better with recording cockpit video. Then they can see where the pilots are looking, and what they are doing, rather than having to guess it.

Re:cockpit video

[moderatorrater]

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. -- Carl Sagan Video would require many times more storage than all the rest of the instruments put together and it would have less value overall. If they have all the information that the pilot has, then they can pretty well guess at what the pilot's looking at. On the other hand they could have a video that duplicates a lot of information, brings new information that's less valuable than the old information, and introduces increased cost and complexity.

Also, I really like that quote use it whenever I can.

Re:cockpit video

[flyboyfred]

Perhaps, but the airline pilots are strongly opposed to the idea. There's a lot on the web about the controversy. Enjoy.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cockpit+video+recorder

Re:cockpit video

[grumbel]

Video would require many times more storage Is storage really a problem? You can have gigabytes of solid state memory these days without a problem and in the coming years even more so. Of course a blackbox will not run on of-the-selves memory, but even then a few hours of video don't sound all that tricky. Or for the same matter, why limit the audio to 2 hours? Why not mandate 10 hours so that you have the complete flight recorded, not just the last two hours? Is storage really that much a problem?

Re:Loss of Reliability

[alshithead]

"What's the difference between "loss of reliability" and "failure"?"

In the most general terms, I would think that something can still function to a certain extent after suffering a loss of reliability and won't function at all when experiencing a failure.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[ozbird]

Obligatory Red Dwarf quote (from "Psirens"):

Starbug crashes on to an asteroid.
LISTER and CAT are putting out small fires on the consoles. KRYTEN is checking the computer screen. RIMMER staggers in.

RIMMER: Any damage?
CAT: Not too bad. A couple of the sensors are out, fuel-intake chambers are both flooded and the left pilot seat doesn't go up and down any more.
RIMMER: We came through that intact?
KRYTEN: Starbug was built to last, sir. This old baby's crashed more times than a ZX81.
LISTER: It's the material it's built from. Aerospace engineers discovered that, after a plane crash, the only thing that always survives intasct is a cute little doll. They built Starbug out of the same stuff.

Why mandate an upper limit?

[Chuck Chunder]

I can see why you'd want to specify a minimum time but why a maximum? What disadvantage is there to having a device that does 15 minutes?

Umm - the mechanics..

[cheros]

It's been a while since I've been near solid state technology, but I have used tape for years. I'm not so sure tape is more resilient, but I like your idea of doubling up.

wide angle view

[supernova87a]

Maybe this is a little bit off topic, but I for one am quite grateful to live in a society where air safety is so well looked after and monitored. We really don't skimp (in general) on air safety, and take quite a rational view about how checking and maintaining planes, and training pilots actually contributes to preventing accidents.

This is far from the common attitude in some other places around the world. In some other countries, operating an "airline" is still a very seat-of-the-pants operation -- passengers are unrecorded, cargo is misloaded, pilots are bribed to take things they don't know about, etc. And if a plane were to crash, people would throw up their hands and say, "what can be done, these things just happen", or "it's God's will that accidents occur", or "why talk about it?". But here, we've been accustomed to understanding that there were tangible causes behind every accident, and if we could only see the moments before the crash (since often no one survives to tell us what happened), we might be able to prevent future accidents. This is an admirable thing that I am very grateful for.

The state of the technology and awareness of safety are so advanced that accidents have decreased so much in the US, that the NTSB/airlines, having fewer crashes to investigate, now analyze the data from normal flights, and look for patterns that suggest unsafe conditions -- and they change those unsafe conditions. see this article for example

Finally, just regarding some of the other points made here, I am not an expert, but I think it would be impractical to have a nonstop streaming black box. These recorders not only capture audio, but sub-second sampled data for dozens, if not scores of readings from the aircraft systems -- non stop. Multiply that by the number of planes in the sky, and it quickly becomes overwhelming I think. Most airplane data systems are at the text messaging level of bandwidth.

Re:wide angle view

[JimBobJoe]

I think it's great to mention this, just in case we forget. I think aviation safety is one of humanity's most impressive achievements. We take hundreds of people, stick them in a tube, and hurl them across the skies at 500mph thousands of times per day--and we can go years (in the US) without a fatal accident--all while the airlines themselves are operating on cost/profit margins that work out to a penny per passenger.

One problem.....

[IHC Navistar]

I can see the good points of the mandated upgrades, but no more magnetic tape?

The pros and cons of solid-state memory in black boxes:

Pros:

1) Increased number of system parameters.
2) Smaller phyisical size, which permits larger drive size and thus longer data retention. The available space can allow for either a smaller overall unit size (not necessarily a good thing) or more room for battery power for beacons.

Cons:

1) More susceptible to impacts.
2) Can be damaged by voltage spikes/short circuits, or electrical faults (momentary or continuous).
3) If part of the memory unit is damaged or missing, you could lose some very critical parameter recordings, or more likely, the information entirely.
4) Still susceptable to heat-induced losses of stored data.
However, if a tape (analog) recording system is used, you can still use the information on the rest of the spool. Plus, there is still the ability to recover parameter information from physicall damaged portions of the tape.
5) Easier to manipulate/alter the stored information.
6) Easier to "acidentally destroy".

Here is an analogy:

If you shot at a "Black Box", it is guarenteed that the unit will be a total loss, with no information recoverable. If you shot at a current (analog tape) unit, ther is still usable tape. Plus, even the physically damaged tape (ripped/torn/creased) will have parameters that can be analyzed (There is a case of a murderer who tried to cover up his tracks by cutting up an old school floppy disk in an attempt to detroy incriminating evidence. Didn't work.).

Sometimes, newer technology isn't necessarily better than old technology.

Re:One problem.....

[bhima]

I think you have all of that completely wrong. Black boxes in airplanes are extremely robust and resistant to most of the things you listed (like being shot, dropped or burned)... And to being gernerally toyed with.

define "better"

[Quadraginta]

What makes a streaming solution better? Seems to me you're assuming (1) a large proportion of black boxes fail, so we need to ensure better survivability of the data by not tying it to the survivability of a physical box, or (2) there's some value in getting access to the data a day or two faster by having it on a disk drive somewhere immediately, instead of having to go find the box in the wreckage.

I think both are questionable. In the first place, I believe black boxes routinely survive crashes unscathed. You might make a case for mid-ocean crashes, where the wreck is unrecoverable (and leaving out the considerable expense in getting data off a plane in mid-ocean through a network of satellites, since no ground stations will be in sight). However, I believe generally deducing the cause of a crash is a multiple-pronged effort, using not just data from the BB, but also evidence from the wreck, ATC records, maintenance records, et cetera. If the wreck is unrecoverable, and there isn't any clue in the ATC data, i.e. everything hinges on the BB data, I'm thinking you're not going to solve that crash anyway, most of the time.

Secondly, I believe solving a puzzling crash generally takes at least weeks, if not months to years. Having the data in your hand a day or so faster seems unlikely to matter very much. I doubt the FAA has even assembled an investigative team that fast.

Re:define "better"

[Doc Ruby]

The boxes are often not found for hours or days, and do indeed sometimes get lost forever (especially at sea, as you mention). Those hours and days of searching, often in remote locations, are expensive. The delay is painful for survivors and their families, as well as possible but unknown risks that often ground that entire model of aircraft for the duration.

A midocean plane doesn't need a ground station, and the existing satellite networks are adequate and cheap. Even if they weren't, expanding them would be a good investment, even just considering the cost savings from skipping long searches for lost black boxes.

This isn't some all or nothing scenaria, where the world changes from to good because the black box data is available in realtime. But it is a substantial improvement. And right now the FAA is demanding an upgrade that is a tiny tweak, relatively, from a 1970 tech to a 1980 tech.

why not?

[Quadraginta]

Goodness, why not? On the scale of nanometer-size objects, 3g forces are miniscule.

what do you record?

[Quadraginta]

Er...how are all the sensors and stuff that might be sending data to the flight recorder going to be working if the power is out? Doesn't the data come in as electrical signals from some powered transducer? Seems to me with a battery on the flight recorder you'd just be recording some extra silence. The only thing that would continue to work would be any sensors actually inside the flight recorder, e.g. internal accelerometers and such. Certainly there's no way to record voices from the cockpit if all the cockpit microphones have lost power.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh!

Why give a range for a minimum-time requirement?

[DoofusOfDeath]

The new rules also require an independent backup power source for the voice recorders to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted.

What does it mean when people say this? I assume the FAA doesn't mind at all if the battery backup lasts longer than 11 minutes. So what's the true battery-duration requirement: 9 minutes? 11 minutes?

Airlines can choose too

[daBass]

It is not just the manufacturers that make that decision - the type of flight data / cockpit voice recorder is an option like most others and airlines can choose which one is installed.

I have no link, but in several episodes of Air Crash Investigations it was made clear that British Airways pays a premium for the more advanced models that record many more parameters than more frugal airlines do. Not sure if they have battery backup. In one episode, a problem occurred twice on 737s of other (US) airlines. But it wasn't until BA's better black box recorded it that they could figure it out and fix all 737s, saving many lives. Fortunately, the BA problem didn't result in a fatal crash.

BA supposedly also regularly takes out the data packs for crew evaluation - too many ILS deviations or rough landings and it's a reprimand and back to the sim for you!

Re:Airlines can choose too

[the pickle]

BA supposedly also regularly takes out the data packs for crew evaluation - too many ILS deviations or rough landings and it's a reprimand and back to the sim for you!

I work for a major US airline and my airline is specifically prohibited from using FDR or CVR data in a disciplinary manner (accidents that are the result of willful negligence or malicious intent are excepted, obviously). The airline can use FDR data for QA purposes (that is, to gather gross data and evaluate whether various procedures are generally being followed), but they can't use it to punish (or reward) pilots. Most other US airlines have similar clauses in their pilot contracts, and I'd be surprised if British Airways didn't have a similar clause in theirs.

p

Re:Airlines can choose too

[daBass]

They didn't go into too much detail, just that it was for crew evaluation. Not quite sure if they are allowed to pick on individual pilots.

Mind you, as a passenger, I hope they do! Not that it probably matters - in most cases of a pilot-error accident it seems to be a screw up so bad (running out of fuel with x-feed on while one engine is leaking gallons a second, controlled flight into terrain, etc) that you wouldn't be able to predict it from how rough their average landing is anyway...

Apple Air???

[mtmra70]

Is it me or is the Apple Air more than fitting (with it's SSD)? /sarcasim

Re:Apple Air???

[kellyb9]

Dream on! The price of putting Mac Air on every single plane in the US is far too high! (Sorry couldn't resist)

Not really

[SmallFurryCreature]

There have been plenty of investigations where a simple video feed of the cockpit would have made it a lot easier to determine what is going on.

The instrument readings only tell you WHAT the input was, NOT what the pilot was doing. Rememeber, there was something WRONG. What is the instruments were showing the pilot was pushing forward on the stick, but the video shows he was pulling back? Clear sign were the problem was, but your blackbox would never show it.

Voice is often hard to understand especially if the pilot for whatever reason doesn't have his headset on.

Video would really help, but might be too big to record. But investigators would LOVE to be able to SEE what is going on in the cockpit. If the video is hi-res enough it might even confirm that what the blackbox is recording and what the instruments are SAYING is actually the same.

Re:Not really

[Dun Malg]

What [if] the instruments were showing the pilot was pushing forward on the stick, but the video shows he was pulling back? Clear sign were the problem was, but your blackbox would never show it. Seriously, you need to read up on the 88 data points these things record. The FDR records both the control input positions* and the control surface positions**. Really, essentially everything that affects the craft's flight is recorded. There isn't anything for a camera to see!

* FAA regs Sec 121.344, parts 12, 13, 14
** as above, parts 15 16 17

Re:Why give a range for a minimum-time requirement

[mikelieman]

10 minutes +/- 10% ?

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[Anonymous Coward]

How'd he even get modded funny? That joke's older than Orville Wright.

Re:why not?

[aadvancedGIR]

Even for a human being, that's perfectly bearable since it's approximatively the acceleration you get on a rollercoaster. Over 50 years ago, Dr Stapp totally recovered from a self-inflicted 46G decelration, proving the interest of seatbelts in plane (and car) crashes.

Good News! More Cargo Space.

[that this is not und]

On small puddle-jumper flights, the fourth row of seats will now be removed. More room for cargo! And the plane now only has capacity for 9 passengers!

They can fit a really BIG black box back in the cargo area now.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[leonbev]

Sarcasm detector on the fritz today, eh?

Looks Like I will be busy

[felto]

I will keep my eye open for a TCTO, This should keep us Comm/Nav folk busy for awhile.
Might be a good Idea to buy some stock in honeywell and L3, Some times I wounder if they have people on the inside to help them sell their products.

Don't make 'em too small!

[us7892]

If the *new blackboxes* are too small, and they stop sending a beacon, they would be harder to find in mangled wreckage strewn across thousands of feet, or 400 feet below the surface of the water.

I suppose.

After reading the Wikipedia article

[caveat]

They didn't CFIT at 1200kph.

They did keep throttling up, but followed proper procedures by requesting clearance for a lower altitude. Then, "[a]"fter receiving no response, the pilots lowered the aircraft's wing slats to maintain their altitude and lower the plane's stall speed"...at way beyond the maximum speed for lowering the flaps. One ripped off with predictable results.

Far Superior Alternative

[partowel]

This option has been available for a long time. Some European airlines use it.

Active Telemetry. All data is sent to a ground station. Every hour of operation of the aircraft is logged.

NOT in a black box, but in a secure system.

But is costs more. Oh no. More security, more costs. Go figure, eh?

Black box technology is useless. Hey lets all waste time looking for a black box.

NO. LETS NOT.

The USA is CRAP when it comes to safety.

Unless its the president's safety. If its some minimum wage pawn with no health insurance, then screw the pawn.

Maybe the name has changed. Oh well.

Thats my $0.02.

Realtime Streaming Buoy

[Xandar01]

If such a streaming network is to difficult, why not a launch able buoy system?

Flight recorder routinely records data as is does now (with some of the new recording times)
The storage medium is actually in the buoy which is ejected manually or automatically under certain conditions.
The flight recorder then links to the buoy to continue transmitting last minute data.
The buoy, with GPS and location beacon, floats to safety with most of the data intact while receiving the final moments of crash data.
The flight recorder would need only enough local storage as a back up to what was transmitted to the buoy.

Re: 'decent English'

[mujadaddy]

The Associated Press standard is "nine to 11."

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[felipekk]

I know you are being sarcastic, but what most people don't know is that even if we were able to build and fly such a thing, on a crash at high speed, all passengers would still die caused of Traumatic aortic rupture, caused by the severe impact on the chest.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[moosesocks]

You joke, but ignoring the technical impracticality of building airplanes out of heavy armor, a human would not be able to remotely survive the sort of stresses that the black boxes are designed to handle.

For starters, if you drop the black box out the window of an airplane at 30,000 feet, it'll survive more or less intact. It'd be a pretty neat trick for a human to be able to do that.

Moreover, the black boxes are designed to withstand acceleration forces of 3400g (33 kilometers/sec^2!) for 6.5 milliseconds. Would you want to place yourself between a 747, and an immovable object? Those are the magnitudes of the forces we're talking about.

Humans can survive 25-30g for brief periods of time. A force of over 100g will be lethal in all but the most exceptional of circumstances, even if it is only instantaneous.

Re:You almost make it sound fair.

[Dun Malg]

So, basically this is what I imagined. I trust you can open that box and replace the tape recorder and the rest of the device will function well. That should be cheap and easy, unless all of the innards are closely guarded company secrets. If that's the case, and the instrumentation recording also has to be replaced, your company has the ability to rape the flying public that I worried about.

Christ almighty, people like you drive me out of my mind. A fucking iPod (regardless of the box it's wrapped in) can't survive a 500mph impact with submerged bedrock, followed by being pummeled by the entire rest of the plane accordioning and disintegrating on top of it. You come up with a way to make a $5 chinese MP3 recorder survive that, and you'll make a fucking mint. Aircraft "black boxes" have two jobs: 1) the easy job, which is recording the data, and 2) the very hard job, which is surviving the crash. Come back when you understand the basic fucking physics problem inherent in part (2). You're like that dipshit who tried to pay his $90K tax bill by bringing three Mr Coffee machines into the IRS office, citing the fact that the Air Force "paid $30K for a coffeemaker", but not bothering to find out that the Air Force "coffee makers" were custom built hot coffee/tea/soup dispensers built into cargo planes so that Rapid Deployment Force troops could have hot beverages while packed into the barely heated hold of the plane for 16 hours en route the the latest shithole the politicians have decided needs to be "liberated".

Please excuse my profanity, but I've had it up to here with wise-ass fools who think they're clever shooting their mouths off about shit they clearly don't understand.

Re:Loss of Reliability

[kesuki]

there are plenty of reasons to use a raid array of solid state memory to record this stuff, but It's not mandated... so why would they bother? you also have to have the memory chip mounted where it won't overheat, or become kibble in the crash, so having chips in different corners of the device would be advantageous since opposite corners aren't BOTH going to hit the ground first... plus you'll want a corrosion resistant module, so that under water crashes don't become corrupted... and technically, you can 'reverse' engineer the device, by either x-raying it and looking for which way the bits are set, or use some other more high tech type of scan, in the case of a cracked chip, you then program a working chip with that data and you might recover most of what happened... but if the chip is turned to kibble it's not as effective as splicing tape.

No, convince me.

[gr8scot]

Trust me, there's a lot more to a flight recorder than just an ipod in a big orange case. Granted, tape recorders are larger than iPods. Other than that, the iPod is better, and lead weights can make up the difference in mass.

As is, a black box weights 25lbs or more easily. Do you know what kind of force it has to be able to withstand and come out unscathed? About the same, whether it's an iPod or a tape recorder or Intel Inside (TM) the Sturdy Box (not TM yet). I think you're completely missing the point, that a semiconductor-based recorder of the same size and power requirements can record vastly more sound at equal or better quality, and can just as easily be placed inside the same Sturdy Box.