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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.'"
You drop any solid state device hard enough and it'll fail due to stress fractures in the silicon.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.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!
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.
Han shot first.
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.
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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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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.
-- Alastair
Would 10 +/- 1 make it clearer?
-- Alastair
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.
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.)
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
So the recorder does not record much data from after the crash over data from before the crash.
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
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.