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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.'"
That video surveillance would be part of the mandate.
I record my sleeptalking
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.
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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.
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.
Han shot first.
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.
We should try to find a way to built the plane out of the stuff that the black box is made from.
How did you get modded insightful instead of funny?
God spoke to me.
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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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.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
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.
Of course, if your backup power source can only last for 8 minutes and 59 seconds, you are in flagrant violation of the law.
Two words: Spruce Goose.
SimonTek
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?
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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
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.
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?
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
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."
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Better yet, try to find a way to make humans out of stuff that can withstand a 900 MPH crash...
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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
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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?
So "black box"es are actually orange? What a misnomer.
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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
From TFA
As I recall, this is 2008, all year long.
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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
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."
(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."
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
so it's more like an iPhone in a big orange metal box? with accelerometers and shit?
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?
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.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
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?
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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
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.
Insert
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.
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.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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.
Yeah. :-) AFAIK they're easier to find between smoking pieces of airplane if it's orange.
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.
Goodness, why not? On the scale of nanometer-size objects, 3g forces are miniscule.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
Is it me or is the Apple Air more than fitting (with it's SSD)? /sarcasim
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.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
10 minutes +/- 10% ?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Sarcasm detector on the fritz today, eh?
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.
...None because fish don't eat ice cream
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...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
"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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
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.
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.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
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.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
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.
The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.
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).
..." and the pilot asking "what's that?")
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
Seems like there's probably already high voltage hardware on the market, if required.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
You didn't really read it, did you? /. summary, they're mentioned in the first sentence. You must not be new here.
The article talks about flight data recorder in the first, fourth, and fifth paragraphs. Even if you just read the
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The Associated Press standard is "nine to 11."
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
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.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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.~~~~
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
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.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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.
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
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
All the moving parts on the cube work.
:D
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.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
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.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I thought this too, but you're forgetting the fact that figuring out what happened to an aircraft can often prevent future accidents.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
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/
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
I read the same thing on the Interblag, but I don't believe it.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..