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Air France 447 Black Boxes Readable
An anonymous reader writes "It's not a lengthy press release, but it's good news: the memory cards for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the Air France 447 crash in 2009, recently recovered from the sea floor almost two years later, are readable. The data was recovered over the weekend and includes the full two hours of cockpit recording. Apparently it will take weeks for analysis of the data, but it looks like the challenging recovery effort is paying off in a big way. Hopefully detailed answers about the cause of the crash will follow."
Tragic story so far, but atleast it shows the viability of solid-state memory. On a sidenote: If there is only 2 hours of voice recording, why will it take weeks to listen to it?
I don't know anything about aviation, black boxes, water corrosion in deep waters and data recovery but it's clear using my inexistant knowledge on the matter recovering readable black boxes is impossible therefore it's clearly a conspiracy from french authorities (with the help from the illuminatis and the aliens) to protect Airbus and Air France from future lawsuits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhk4HcxhZQM
Pilots talk about cheese, the flight attendants ass for 1:59, strange voice yells "alluhu ackbar", tape ends.
So I guess we'll never know what happened!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The same as for almost every airplane crash -- gravity.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Impact Shock 3400G, 6.5 milliseconds
Penetration Resistance 500 lb. weight from 10 feet
Static Crush 5000 lbs., 5 minutes
High Temperature Fire 1100 C, 30 minutes
Low Temperature Fire 260 C, 10 hours
Deep Sea Pressure and 20,000 feet, 30 days
Sea Water/Fluids Immersion Per ED-56a
The CSMU design has been fully qualified to these requirements and, in fact, exceeds them by considerable margin in key survival areas:
Impact shock has been successfully demonstrated at 4800 G's
High temperature fire exposure has been tested to 60 minutes
Low temperature fire was tested immediately after exposure to 1100 C fire.
From here. Check out the physical design on page 8.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It will be very interesting to see if the conclusions of the data recorder analysis are anything like the conclusions of the team that NOVA put together. Their conclusion, with visual scan of the wreckage, weather data, and ACARS data, was that all three pitot tubes became blocked with supercooled water, which then quickly froze. The pilots didn't know their airspeed, and didn't follow procedure to maintain safe speed by pitch and power alone.
Seems the one part that you can rely on.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I have been following AF447 in detail since it went down. Interesting that the French government., BAE, is investigating a crash involving it's national airline, Air France in a plane made by Airbus, a company 20% owned by the French government. Who do you think will be left holding the bag on that one? Le Figaro is already circulating rumors that the CVR/DFR point to crew error. This fits with the old axiom of air incident investigation that says that if the pilot dies, the cause was pilot error.
One of the major hypotheses about the cause of this crash is a sensor problem.
Getting the data out of the chips is only the first step. Then a timeline has to be
put together, and "interesting" readings, if any, called out and their significance
understood.
Likely as not, nothing will jump out, especially if, say, the autopilot is flying the
aircraft using faulty input, e.g., input from an ice-covered sensor. That is likely
to cause other sensors to show perverse readings that may (or may not) be very
subtle, and may have multiple or ambiguous causes. This may be complicated
by any number of other issues and/or failures.
Once a first pass has been made on putting this all together, the investigators
will almost certainly spend a great deal of time resolving issues and bullet-proofing
their conclusions, if any.
Then again, it may all be resolved right away if the sensor readings are unambiguous,
but the investigators will still spend the time ensuring all the i's are dotted and the
t's crossed in their conclusions.
Finally, I'll note that these recorders traditionally use proprietary recording schemes,
and the air data recorders in particular (generally the more useful) require a good
understanding of the aircraft whose data is recorded. Usually the boxes are sent
to the airframe manufacturer, and the analysis is done there, along with whatever
civil government air-safety personnel are required (e.g., NTSB personnel in the U.S.).
I work as an aerospace engineer and we use similar methods during design testing. It's not just cockpit audio that is recorded, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of parameters from systems all over the aircraft. To be honest, the audio may not even be that useful, if it happened fast enough there is a good chance the pilots didn't even know what was going on.
To go through 100,000 variables and prove beyond reasonable doubt that a specific variable directly caused the crash will probably take far more than week. They are likely aiming to just narrow it down to a certain system within that timeframe.
To give context, I recently spent a month trying to narrow down the cause of a failure in a high fidelity engine simulation. And that was a single system that we had the luxury of knowing everything about, and had the ability to rerun the exact situation repeatedly and tune various parameters to determine a cause. Even then the cause is never any single thing, it's often a huge cascading series of minor deviations from the norm leading to an unforeseen combination of events.
"It's not our fault!" Signed, Airbus
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Last words: "Oh shit..." (or equivalent in French)
Impetuous! Homeric!
Tell the B-2 Pilots to extend the landing-gear BEFORE attempting to land the aircraft!
It's probably in French.
Farnsworth: And this is my universal translator. Unfortunately so far it only translates into an incomprehensible dead language.
Cubert: Hello.
Universal Translator: Bonjour!
Farnsworth: Crazy gibberish!
sigfault (core dumped)
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"?!
Actually there were B-2 like full flying wings in the steel cables and hydraulics golden era of the 1940s. The Gotha-Horten Go-229 from the Third Reich and the Northrop B-49 from the USA. Both crashed in prototype stage, the B-49 even after it had acquired small vertical stabilizers. Fly by wire is very much required for modern airplanes. Soon even the tiny ones, the likeness of Cessna-172 may have FWB to protect the pilot and passengers against human stupidity.
If there is a fundamental flaw in the Airbus system, will this invesitgation be allowed to air it to the public? Or will the incestuous goverment ownership / regulation relationship result in a public statement of 'inconclusive' while the flaws (one would pray) are fixed very, very quietly so as not to disturb current and future Airbus sales.
To be fair, I'm not sure such a scenario would be impossible w.r.t. the FAA and Boeing too.
Your Boeings and Airbuses that serve commercial aviation are inherently stable.
I don't believe its as black and white as stable vs unstable anymore. You yourself point out the fact that the margin of error is very small. My understanding is that the A330 is only stable in an extremely narrow flight envelope. It does have fixed pitch/power settings that can be used if the computers fail, but they are extremely suboptimal, so instead the computer fly's it in ranges that would result in a near instant stall if a human were fully at the controls. The operating theory (before the flight recorder recovery) about why AF447 crashed says that the pilots took to long to get it into the correct pitch/power setting (more than a few seconds) after the computer disabled itself. This stalled the plane, and given the weather situation at the time, it probably wasn't possible to recover.