Flight Data Recorders, Decades Out of Date

Tisha_AH writes "For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant. Some of the advances of cloud computing, mesh radio networks, real-time position reporting and satellite communications are held back by a combination of aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions and the slow gears of government bureaucracy. Many recent aircraft loss incidents remain unexplained, with black boxes lost on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, buried under the wreckage of the World Trade Centers or with critical information suppressed by government secrecy or aircraft manufacturers. Many devices still rely upon tape recorders for voice and data that only record a very small sampling of aircraft dynamics, flight and engine systems or crew behaviors. Technologically simple solutions like battery backup, continual telemetry feeds by satellite and hundreds of I/O points, monitoring many systems should be within easy reach. Pilot unions have objected to the collection and sharing of detailed accident data, citing privacy concerns of the flight crew. Accidents may be due to human error, process problems or design flaws. Unless we can fully evaluate all factors involved in transportation accidents, it will be difficult to improve the safety record. Recommendations by the NTSB to the FAA have gone unheeded for many years. With all of the technological advancements that we work with in the IT field, what sort of best practices could be brought forward in transit safety?"

Comments

Re:tape isn't bad

[Whalou]

Information isn't stored on tape anymore in a blackbox. From TFA:

Today most black boxes--the majority made by L-3 Aviation Recorders, in Sarasota, Fla.--can record 256 distinct streams of digital data, or parameters, per second, and store them all for 25 hours before writing over them. The latest voice recorders can store 180 minutes of conversation, while the older ones store 30 minutes. Both kinds of data are stored in stacked semiconductor dynamic RAM memory boards.

Re:tape isn't bad

[hot soldering iron]

Bullshit. My wife worked on the "black boxen" (really orange for visibility in a wreck). She was always complaining because the internal tape mechanisms were the exact same as an old 8-track from the 70's, and with the tape constantly running the ferrite wore off. The boxes were full of black crap, and sometimes the rollers were so old, the rubber went gummy and fscked up all the tape. Lot's of the recorders came in totally inoperative, and had been that way for a long time.

She was so glad when they finally started making, and using, solid state drives.

Re:It's absolutely ridiculous

[tibit]

Please don't twist my words. I don't claim there are no non-human-factor caused crashes, I just claim that a vast majority is human factors, and mostly cockpit human factors at that.

AF447 is, to the best of my knowledge, a case of the pilots getting confused by a single point of failure in the air data instrumentation. If you look around, you will find posts by pilots who faced similar issues, had similar ACARS messages sent out, and they recovered without problems as long as they followed procedures. Surely it did fall apart in the sky, but it didn't "just" fall apart, at least there is no reason to think this way so far. To me, that's not unlike China Air 006 but with a different ending.

USAIR 1549, the famous Hudson water landing -- well duh, it was not a human nor a mechanical problem. Force majeure. One example of it, so what.

Emirates 407 -- well thank you, because that was a classic case of human error. Funny coincidence of you mentioning it -- just see yesterday's TDWTF story about Command 696. ;)