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

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

[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.

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: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

[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

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: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.