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Flight Data Recorders, Decades Out of Date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?"
Trying to take that a bit literally, are we?
fp?
So the one place where there would be a benefit to all this nifty surveillance technology that keeps popping up everywhere else and for once, with no civil rights issues ... and they let it go decades out of date. Doing something useful must not be as fun as circumventing the Constitution for politicians.
Really if this were a private Internet connection with an expectation of privacy they'd have come up with 20 different ways to monitor it, 5 of which wouldn't require a warrant due to bad precedent. A flight data recorder has no concerns about privacy and such so it just isn't a priority. Nice. Real nice.
Tape is one of the best long term and reliable storage methods. As long as it doesn't burn (which kills any memory type), it's more stable in most situations than the modern memory devices. Remember, it has be stable in salt water, in high impact, humid environments, dry environments, wide temperature ranges, take electrical shock, etc.
People just think it sucks b/c it's old school and clunky.
"Many recent aircraft loss incidents remain unexplained, ....., buried under the wreckage of the World Trade Centers" - This has to be the dumbest statement of all time. I think everyone knows what happened to the planes THAT WERE FLOWN INTO THE WTC BY MUSLIM TERRORISTS. Fail.
Conservative, mod down for violating
The rabid tone of the summary is completely unsupported by the article itself. Does the submitter have any evidence that advancements are held back by unions, bureaucracy and privacy concerns? The article does not claim anything like that.
They are just proposing a replacement technology with a catchy name. The submitter is a massive troll.
The simple fact is that you can't take ordinary hardware, put it in a box, and say that it's ready to be a flight data recorder. The simple example is storage: even though you can get a 2-TB harddrive into your computer, it'd never pass muster for flight data. Even once you find ultra-ruggedized hardware that you're happy with, you then need to subject it to a few years of excruciatingly brutal tests to make sure that, in the event of a crash, you have a reasonable chance of getting useful information back.
Because the pipeline is so long, the FAA ought to, years ago, have put a development program in place. They should model it along the lines of a DARPA program: one- or two-year commitments with substantial deliverables. Want to play again next year? Better deliver this year. When the contract's up, the money's done. They ought to pit competing factions against each other: have development teams one year become destructive testers of someone else's hardware the next year.
Cptn flt 1524 JFK->CVG just incorrectly set speed for landing. Humans gunna die! lol!
A direct telemetry feed to ground stations or via satellite could be a very interesting way to monitor the airplanes and give crucial information in the even of a crash, but could not replace an on-board logging device. In the even of catastrophic malfunction, on-board recorders are most likely more reliable than networked data. But in the even the on-board recorder is lost, the telemetry feed could give most of the required information on the systems leading and the events leading to the malfunction.
To some extent, these systems already exist and are used by maintenance crew to schedule maintenance and get early warnings on possible problems with the airplane.
Having a global system that is not company-based, but centralized and international could give not only make incident reconstitution easier, but might also improve transparency on aircraft maintenance on less "serious" airlines and provide real time information (wetter radar feed, wind shear data, turbulence, etc.) to air traffic control and weather forecasters to improve safety overall.
The major technical issue that this would bring is a problem of bandwidth. There are a lot of aircraft in the air and it would generate huge amounts of data. Transmission, storage and analysis would all be challenge.
Umm, no. You're almost a century out of touch with reality. What you say was true in 1930s.
Today, when an airplane crashes, the human has failed. Pretty much always. Technical issues that lead to crashes are very, very rare. If you were to place monetary bets, a winning strategy is to bet for human failure.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
held back by a combination of aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions and the slow gears of government bureaucracy
Does the article support the notion of the pilots unions fighting against modernization of flight recorders? No, it doesn't. Does common sense support such a notion? No, it doesn't either.
Really, this is not a place for union bashing. If you have an axe to grind, so be it. But don't try to wield your axe at every conceived opportunity, or you'll end up making yourself look silly - as you just did.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Passengers are represented by unions?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Really? Air France Flight 447 just falling apart in the sky going 537 mph at 35,000 is from a human failure? US Airways Flight 1549? Emirates Flight 407?
No, humans aren't the cause of all crashes, a chunk of them yes, but not close to "pretty much always".
Checking that out and looking up the causes of the accidents you'll see human error by the flight crew is a cause of some, but mechanical failure is a larger cause of accidents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_2009
And yes, I do have my pilot's license.
Given that "Cloud Computing" as a buzzword is only about two years old, and has yet to receive a great deal of commercial deployment, I think we can hardly blame the FAA, NTSB, Boeing, Airbus, and airlines for not deploying it Right The Heck Now.
What does that even mean, to use "Cloud Computing" for the "black box"? Cloud Computing has about as coherent of a definition as the previous buzzword du jour, "Web 2.0".
SirWired
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. ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
"For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant.
There's been enormous progress in flight recorders. The first ones only recorded a few basic items, like altitude, airspeed, attitude, and control positions. The recording mechanism used a stainless steel tape, on which diamond points scratched graph lines. (Those were really rugged. That stainless steel tape could survive almost anything and still be read.)
Today's recorders are (inevitably) digital, recording perhaps a hundred parameters. Most key engine and airframe data is logged. They also record both what the pilot's control positions are and what the aircraft control surfaces are doing, which allows distinguishing between pilot error and control failure. There's a separate cockpit voice recorder. Enough data is recorded that the data can be loaded into an aircraft simulator and played back to reproduce the events.
Few flight recorders are not recovered. In the last 10 years, there have been four failures to recover a flight recorder - two from 9/11, Air France Flight 447, and Siberia Airlines 1812. Of those, only Air France 447 is still a mystery in which flight recorder data would be useful. And, in fact, Air France 447 was "phoning home", over a low-bandwidth maintenance link, reporting trouble with the air data sensors.
So there's an argument for sending more data back on the maintenance links, but this does not involve "the cloud".
Next week on slashdot, the aircraft that can post to twitter, and update it's own facebook status.
Air France 447 is now friends with Atlantic Ocean
Status: Crashed
You're absolutely correct about redundancy. There's a long chain of things that is supposed to happen before any flight. Here's what has to happen before I fly my little rental Cessna 172:
That isn't even all of it, and the list is more complete for a plane that actually has a black box. There are other things that happen along the way that aren't part of official checklists, including brake checks, validating compass and heading indicator accuracy, using the radio, and just paying attention for anything that doesn't feel right. There are checklists for take-off, climb, leveling, descent, landing, post-landing, and shut-down, not to mention all the emergency checklists. I've got a stall warning horn as well that is a function of the aerodynamics of the plane, and the autopilot lets me know if it's disabled. I fly a G1000 version of the C172 with two big displays, and it's got even more alerts, both visual and audio, to let me know when something is amiss, including when traffic is close (gotta love TCAS). I usually fly with flight following anyway, so ATC can help me avoid other planes (and vice versa). I'm still always on the lookout for other traffic, though.
If something goes wrong, it's almost certainly my fault that I didn't notice something, planned poorly, or flew beyond my skills (pilot error), with a small chance that the A&P and/or IA missed something (still human error), a very, very tiny chance that there was a mechanical issue that was not addressable with inspections, and an almost infinitesimal chance of simple bad luck.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The biggest impediments are in the huge difficulties to get any new technology past the certification process and the cost of insuring against liability. (The liability issues around general aviation were ameliorated somewhat about 10-15 years ago with the passage of a law limiting the 'long tail' liability for older planes.)
My personal case in point - when I was taking flying lessons a long time ago, you could buy a brand new CB radio for about $50. An airplane VHF radio with not-that-much-different capabilities cost over $2000 at the time, had lousy audio and relatively poor reception compared to the CB radio.
The airplane radio had to pass both FCC and FAA (and, I think a couple of other institutions) certifications, each of which cost the manufacturer over $1 million for re-certification every time they wanted to change a resistor. Each of the parts had to go through the same process, which generally took several years. So the aviation radio was built out of ten-year-old parts using 8 year old designs, and the cost of each improvement had to be amortized over a few thousand units - so just getting certified can cost 1/4 to 1/3 of the cost of the part.
And the radios still suck.
Then, liability insurance was also about 1/3 of the retail cost of the radio. At that time if a private plane crashed, everyone within a mile of the crash sued the manufacturer of every component that had ever been on the plane. Still today, if a company makes a part that is on a commercial airplane, they are likely to get sued if the plane crashes, even if their part had nothing to do with anything, and their liability is essentially unlimited.
In one example I knew about (about 1985), a guy forgot to put fuel in his plane, took off and crashed into a house about 1/4 mile from the runway. One of the companies that was sued was the maker of the original OEM starters for that brand of airplane. They were sued for $millions. It cost them almost $5 million in legal fees to prove they were not at fault, even though their starter was not even on that plane - it had been replaced years before. They got out of the business, and never came back.
TOday we have the worst of possible worlds - the regulatory environment punishes innovation and makes it impossible for small companies to compete due to the infrastructure required to meet the regulatory requirements, and the liability environment stomps on them while they're down. So we have nothing but big monolithic industry giants with every incentive to not innovate, to not put the 'new thing' on. Boeing is being amazingly courageous in building the 787. They are betting the company not only on the marketability of the plane, but the potential liability.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/