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AF 447 Flight Recorder Found In the Atlantic
romiz writes "The memory of the flight recorder for the Air France 447 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed on June 1st 2009, has been found on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, and brought back to the surface in good shape. This is the data recorder, which saves the flight parameters. The search is still continuing in hope of finding the voice recorder containing the sounds recorded in the plane's cockpit."
All the way.
Do not click on above link, it's a shock video.
No mod points or I'd mod it down.
This is quite possibly one of the best examples of just how far underwater robotics have come. They literally found something that is harder to find then a needle in a haystack by several orders of magnitude.
turn in your nerd credentials for thinking that would work
additionally, flight data recorders do send out a ping for 30 days:
http://boingboing.net/2009/06/03/miles-obrien-bloggin.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does somebody know why it's so hard for them to find it? I would assume that it's properly secured against crashes, and has a GPS/transmitter on board? What causes this to be so hard?
Inside the data recorder it's attached to a pinger which sends out a sound pulse on a regular basis for about a month after a crash; that makes it easy to find if the recorder stays intact and it's in relatively shallow water, but in this case it's so far down that the pinger was barely audible during the first search (it wasn't detected during the search and only found by post-search processing of the recorded audio data) and the various layers in the ocean reflect sound so it's hard to track. Obviously the batteries died long ago so the only way to find it now was to look for an orange cylinder on the seabed.
In fact, finding a needle in a haystack is trivial. Douse the whole stack in gas, torch it, and then run a strong electromagnet over the ash.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Got a GPS?
Good.
Now, go jump in a lake with it.
Where are you? What? No GPS lock? Oh, that's ok, it still transmits its last known coordinates and you shouldn't be too far from there; I'll just use that signal. Oh... wait, there's no signal. Hmm, that LARGE BODY OF WATER must be blocking it.
No bother, anyway, those coordinates would only be accurate enough to tell me you're at the crash site; something I already know.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
With more than a little of help from the Americans at WHOI .
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Development cycles in Aviation are very long. Technology used is generally very old but well proven. Both recorders are probably jam packed with data with no room to spare and no free space to double up. The newer systems being designed will transmit the data which would now be recorded so it won't have to be scraped off the bottom of the Atlantic.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you're close enough to see a flashing LED you're close enough to see the wreckage. The ping is audible (with the right equipment) through thousands of feet of muddy water. Sound travels farther than light in the ocean.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
During an underwater robotics conference I attended, one of the presenters was describing their attempt at using GPS for location fixes every time their autonomous underwater vehicle surfaced in the ocean. They ended up trashing the idea because they found that as little 5 mm of seawater on top of the GPS antenna would prevent a GPS lock.