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The $100,000 Device That Could Have Solved Missing Plane Mystery
First time accepted submitter evidencebase writes "How can an airliner simply disappear, leaving no clues? And why do we have to wait until the black boxes are found to learn what happened to Flight MH370? As this article explains, there's no good reason that flight data needs to go down with the plane, because the technology to stream it to ground, from the moment things start to go wrong, is already on the market. It can be fitted to a commercial airliner for less than $100,000. But the industry has decided that it's not worth the expense. Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Or does it cost $100k PLUS the cost of labor and maintanence to install the device PLUS the huge cost of taking the plane out of service for x amount of time while the device is being installed (even if its installed at the same time as other maintanence is done, its still a non-zero cost)
Are we sure this plane wasn't on Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 ?
black boxes are almost always recovered. the only thing it would save is a big oceanic search -- how often does that happen?
I can see how a constant stream of telemetry might be cost-prohibitive, but what about a squirt of data consisting of -
...sent every five minutes? At least that would give a 'last known' location.
- Flight Number
- Lat / Long
- Airspeed
- Groundspeed
- Altitude
- Compass heeding
Let's be clear here, this is a tragedy for everyone involved, but the fact of the matter is 100,000 added to the cost of one of these planes just for the off chance that the plane goes down and we can't find it is an unnecessary expense. Most of the time, when a plane goes down we know where it went.
Why, would that somehow bring them back to life?
Posts like this are exactly why we have the TSA in all our airports.
As much as penny-pinching on safety systems is a bad habit, is the emotive "zOMG, Tell the Families!!!" really the best argument that there is for these systems?
It's been what, over three days now, with an aircraft that disappeared from radar at commercial cruising altitude without so much as a burst of garbled obscenities from the flight crew. Do you think that your family is clinging to those little flotation-device pillows, awaiting a rescue that would have come in time if only for upgraded real-time blackbox transmission?
If anybody derives some sort of comfort from whatever they do manage to find, all the better; but this is all trying to recover data for failure analysis, not survivors.
Now, if you want to justify real-time transmission, check out the amount of (incidentally not paid for by the airline) search gear that has been diverted from Malaysian, Chinese, and other sources to looking for the debris. Whole bunch of ships, airplane and helicopter overflights, diversion of what, 10 satellites? That starts to make the $100k look like savings.
I think an American is now only worth 6.9 million (according to Fox News...)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2...
I couldn't find how much a Malasian life was worth. I think both of these numbers, the mix of people on the plane, and the probability of the crash, are what you'd need to compute if it's "worth" it.
If you think it's "worth" it, then install those devices in airplanes you own. Personally, I'd rather not have to pay more for tickets, or taxes, to have them installed in every plane, flying everywhere, in the world.
Knowing the airlines it would somehow be permanently added to the plane ticket price....
Given the number of unrecovered flight recorders and the amount of time that list has been growing and the risks of being involved in a plane crash vs a car crash(no black box)
Since prices are already seem pretty high for me for those cramped seats, I think I side with "the industry" on this one.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
$100K PER PLANE to solve a problem that only occurs very rarely actually seems like quite a bit of money.
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Oy gevalt! This again? When minimizing risk, you have to invest where you get the best returns in lives saved. Obviously, in retrospect, after an accident, you'll wish you had spent infinity on having more safety, but that's the wrong way to think about it.
You should instead:
1) figure out how much you're willing to spend per statistical life saved
2) deploy safety measures up to that point
It's not always going to make sense to keep throwing on all kinds of safety equipment simply to handle every black swan event you can think of -- remember, they do log airplane location remotely and continuously; it's just that that still wasn't enough in this case.
You might as well advocate that planes start giving everyone a parachute, without realizing it makes flight so unaffordable as to push people to less safe modes of transportation.
Comments like these promote a worse understanding of the issues.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
i WILL say that oceanic flights (or flights going over water more than 50 miles or so) should be equipped with a device to send their GPS coordinates via Iridium. that is very cheap to do (they make handheld devices that do this for a few hunded USD).
At least then you'll get the search started in the right area.
Rolls Royce does this with their engines. They get real time telemetry whenever the engine is running.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This $100,000 gadget doesn't do continuous data transmission. It starts transmitting when something goes wrong, and that's it.
If something does go wrong and there's time for this thing to start transmitting, then wouldn't there also be time for the pilot (copilot, navigator, stewardess) to get on the radio and say "Hello, chaps on the ground. Something has gone wrong."
If it blows up in mid-air or something like that, you won't get anything more with this device than you get without it.
What do you gain for $100,000, then?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
How many people could afford the cost of a plane ticket after all the aircraft have this device installed? The cost will be passed on to the customers.
The fine article states that L-3 (who has a bit of a conflict of interest) says that streaming all data real-time would cost $300M/yr. The mfr of the "glass box" says it wouldn't stream data until there was an anomalous event, and so it wouldn't cost nearly that much.
Who's right? Well, TFA states "Of course, that wouldn’t yield much information if a plane is blown out of the sky by a bomb, or suffers a sudden catastrophic structural failure at cruising altitude. But in those rare cases, conventional black boxes are really the only viable technology."
So you either stream data all the time, or you miss the really crazy disappearances. Which is exactly the ones you WANT this data from. So to the families of passengers of MH370 - we don't know where your plane is because we didn't spend billions of dollars to equip every plane and then spend an extra $300Million a year to run the system.
Oh, and since the transponder that relays back basic information failed on this flight, there's a chance that whatever took it out would have also taken out the full-data relay, and after spending all those billions of dollars we might *still* not be able to find it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The author failed to account for the increased cost required to launch more satellites...
"It transmits data via Iridium satellitesâSâ"âSwhich also allow people to use a satellite phone from anywhere in the worldâSâ"âSand can be programmed to start streaming flight data when a plane deviates from its flight plan, or instruments suggest something is going wrong."
I've looked into an Iridium sat phone for use while camping in the middle of nowhere. The thing is that their network is near or at capacity much of the time. Many times their phones can get signal but can't get a channel clear to make a call.
A quick google search says a cheap satellite is $300 million. I'm not sure how many we would need, but it would not be a small number.
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
I think I could just barely provide a water-tight homing beacon with redundant power sources at, say, a million a dozen.... which leaves room for campaign contributions to secure the contracts.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The industry has decided that it's not worth the expense.
Right now it seems that the plane might have been flown off course and the transponder was shut down. The thing about the black box is that apparently is hard if not impossible to shut down. Anything that transmits can be disabled. There is reason to believe that such a device would have done any good in this case, This is just another effort by some corporation to try to sell a movie plot security measure. Like arming pilots when locking the cockpit door would do or naked scanners instead of trained surveillance. The plane will be found, if it was a crash the bodies will be recovered, and the cost will be lower than the 3 billion needed to equip the next 15 years of commercial aircraft. Such a device might be good, but we can't assume some conspiracy of evil greedy airlines. There may be good reasons, such as the fact it doesn't really work as well as the PR suggests.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why not HF-APRS?
"Of course, that wouldn’t yield much information if a plane is blown out of the sky by a bomb, or suffers a sudden catastrophic structural failure at cruising altitude. But in those rare cases, conventional black boxes are really the only viable technology."
MH370 was sending data when it disappeared. The ADS-B data can be found on FlightRadar 24. Rolls Royce indicated that it was receiving ACARS data from the engines.
All of this stuff was either switched off or stopped working because of a sudden catastrophic failure.
Current:
* http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Older (after AirFrance disaster)
* http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
* http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07...
An appeal to emotion? On my slashdot?
I hate sigs.
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370.
-1 Flamebait
Wait a minute, how many lives could this have saved, exactly? Sounds to me like all it would do is say THE DEAD PEOPLE ARE RIGHT HERE.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
It shouldn't cost that much. Many planes already have data service (run thru satellites) that they sell to passengers. Shouldn't be that hard to tap into the available instrument data and send out a blurp every 10-15 seconds. Doesn't even need fancy 2-way handshaking. Just send the encrypted packets and grab them as they arrive at the NOC. Not a big deal if the occasional blurp gets missed. But, if they never get another blurp from a plane, at least they got the data right up to the point of disaster.
Considering number of people per flight and number of flights per plane, the extra cost is negligible.
But it would mean slightly less profit for the airline company.
Once again, the free market fails where regulation would succeed - the former can only correct for the future AFTER everyone's dead and un-buried.
(because there would be eyewitnesses to any crashes)
Except for the last plane on either side.
They reel you in with that el-cheapo 100K offer, but then you have to sign a 24 month contract. The "unlimited" streaming plan streams at high speed only for 2GB, then it crawls at 128 Kbps. Want really really unlimited, then you pay per GB. Then there are roaming charges. International roaming charges. Then international texting charges. You have to root the device to install WhatsApp. When the contract is up they will do employ high pressure sales tactics to sign on for another two years for marginal upgrades. Original "free" equipment is designed to crap out in 24 months. Stay away from these data streaming companies.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Nevertheless, $100k is a lot of money...
True, $100K may be a lot of money, if it's the price you pay to put a device into your $10K car.
But we are talking about a jet plane that is worth $100M and up.
What is the ratio of $100K to the original plane pricetag of $100M ? 1: 1000
Allow me to put it in the context of your car - Let's say your car's price tag is $10K, What will that device cost you, if it's 1000th of your car ? $10 ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Poorly researched attempt to profit off of disaster is poorly researched.
Ok, according to the FAA there's ~3,739 U.S. registered passenger jets which carry more than 90 passengers (http://atwonline.com/aircraft-amp-engines/faa-us-commercial-aircraft-fleet-shrank-2011). Cost to fit just U.S. registered aircraft with this device would therefore be just under $374 million.
Number of U.S. registered passenger jets which can carry > 90 passengers that have crashed with any fatalities since 2000 is maybe 5 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft#2000), and the number of those where it wasn't immediately obvious where the wreckage was was zero.
So in the US alone, we're talking close to $374 million dollars to fit out just aircraft that carry more than 90 people, for a return of nothing. I couldn't find a reliable estimate of the number of commercial passenger aircraft currently flying and capable of carrying > 90 passengers globally, but I did see a number of guestimates in the 15,000-20,000 range. Assuming there's only 10,000 currently active passenger planes in the world capable of carrying >90, that's $1,000,000,000 to fit them with this gadget. The number of planes since 2000 which went down with passengers on board which couldn't be immediately located is what? Two? The Malaysian Airlines one now and the Air France one a few years back?
So if every passenger plane in the world capable of carrying more than 90 people had been fitted with this gadget since 2000 we'd currently be running at half a billion dollars per actual use. I can think of a *lot* of uses for half a billion dollars which would actually save tens of thousands of lives. There isn't a single case in the last 20 years where this gadget would have saved a single life - all it can do, at best, is provide slightly faster confirmation to grieving families that their loved ones were indeed dead and here's how it happened. Which is not trivial - I don't mean to invalidate what such news might mean to someone with a loved one who was on that flight - but oh, my, that's a staggering bill to just provide speedy confirmation of a loved one's death for a few hundred people.
"Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370"....
Would this device have stopped the plane from crashing? No. It would have told us what happened... So, in other words, it wouldn't have helped at all. We'd still be telling the families that their loved ones died. We'd just be able to tell them what happened. Which we'll be able to do once we recover the plane (and we will, be patient, sheesh) and find the black box.
In other words, this device does nothing that we need. It just tells what happend in time for the news cycle to remember there was this plane crash.
the oldest one turns 4 years old at the end of the month. They are "maintained" by dockworkers, exist in a very taxing environment (dredging) and they Just Work. www.robots-everywhere.com So what? Buy one or don't, I don't care.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Good point. I didn't see how much it was worth to find a dead American, Malaysian, or a dead airplane either...
The US's puppet Israel has been killing Iranian nuclear scientists. It was only a matter of time until Iran started killing US scientists.
20 high-value semiconductor physicists in one go is a big achievement for the Iranian state.
"It starts transmitting when something goes wrong"
In theory it might start transmitting when something goes wrong, but clearly things can "go wrong" that would also prevent the start of the transmission. For example, if a couple of hijackers steal a plane and fly it to Thailand, they will turn off the device around the same time that they turn off the transponder. And just diverting the plane to a different location isn't likely to be detected as "something going wrong" to start the data transmission anyway.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How often do events such as this occur? The suffering of families waiting for news is not a rational reason to add at least $100,000 to the cost of an airliner. There will be additional costs not mentioned, like bandwidth and infrastructure but of course making things better for those left behind is worth every expense. Perhaps there are other ways to not only answer questions about what went wrong and why but to save lives. There are various methods of aircraft egress in an emergency, perhaps converting business class cocoons into survival pods like the XB-70 would leave fewer families awaiting telemetry from disappeared aircraft.
200 passenger * $500 iphone/samsung... that 100K was already on the plane.. just let people make phone calls.
Is it a 3 billion dollar problem?
Maybe roughly 30,000 plans in service. At 100l / plane, that is 3 billion $$$. Someone would be getting rich selling them. I wonder if timothy (OP) sells them.
To more easily fetch problem information in the event of an emergency, I don't think it would be worth it.
Two aircraft flying in V formation are more efficient than two aircraft flying 500 metres apart side-by-side.
One larger aircraft is more efficient than two aircraft.
But feel free to construct a model, build a wind tunnel and do some testing - if you're right, there's an entire industry interested in buying your idea from you.
"It can be fitted to a commercial airliner for less than $100,000. But the industry has decided that it's not worth the expense. Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Commercial airplane crashes are extremely rare. Even in these rare instances, it is even more rare not to find the aircraft that crashed.
It's NOT worth the extra expense. Should we really believe that *anything* is worth doing at *any* cost if it saves *any* lives? I would say no. But you don't have to take my word for it. People risk their own lives everyday to save money. It doesn't take a big greedy corporation to do it. If you offered people the option to pay $100 extra for their plane ticket so that in the event of a crash, their dead body could be located a bit more quickly, I think most people would say "fuck that".
It's easy to scream "Tell that to the families" after a catastrophe involving loss of life.
Why not ground all air traffic forever so that this kind of thing never happens again?. Is that too extreme? Well if you think it's too extreme, why don't you TELL THAT TO THE FAMILIES that you would rather their loved ones DIE than be inconvenienced.
"We're tracking every flying object in the sky." -- Bullshit. I guess that was just grandstanding from NORAD and also demonstrates the futility of the NRO. How many billions have Americans alone spent to ensure this can never happen already? I mean, was every bit of that post 9/11 "security" just posturing and scaremongering?
Egg meet face, world. If you ask me, having a large passenger jet disappear in mid air just goes to show how much we've squandered in the guise of security when without actually getting any safety at all.
How can two aircraft fly in a V formation?
What really matters is the total number of units sold / by the number of times it's needed. 10s of thousands of planes at 100k a whack for something that happens to 1 or 2 of them. That's a pretty pricey usage.
article admits in cases when plane suddenly crashes the system is useless, the black box is only useful source of data
reality is a system such as Next Gen that would have sufficient satellite coverage and bandwidth will cost billions and take years to implement (including launching satellites). that's the only way the tens of thousands of daily flights could have their data recorded.
So we'll tell the families of the presumed dead of the Malaysian airlines flights not to listen to technically ignorant assholes like you, the technology to track flights that end in sudden disaster over the open sea just don't exist in 2014.
Well, he is a doofus of death. It's like he registered a decade ago just for this moment.
According to Malaysian military sources, the plane turned around and was detected later west of Malaysia. What makes you so sure that it didn't land somewhere in Sumatra or Sri Lanka or wherever the kidnappers were headed? So far I've heard of no indication of a crash, other than flight data indicating height loss before the communication was interrupted. Height loss could also indicate that they were preparing to fly under the radar.
Why should the company pay additional cost when there is no added benefit. This does not affect the outcome of the event, i.e the demise of the aircraft. If so, why should the black box be abandoned for something else? I understand that the families would like to know more about the crash, but the data provided by the blackbox should be enough, unless I am missing something.
-- Skara
We don't need to waste extraordinary amounts of money censoring the Internet?
Tell that to the families of children who are seeing violent and/or pornographic content.
But seriously, fuck your summary. Your argument is bullshit. 1/10, would not read sad attempt at playing on emotions again.
I wonder is this device being installed on new-build airliners? A large, well-funded airline like Emirates would certainly want it installed on their large A380 and 777 fleet, especially given the distance of many flights out of Dubai.
The crew already has radio contact with the ground, so you should be able to simply radio back the black box stream. I know enough about electrical engineering to estimate the cost of materials per device at $100 and R&D costs for all (of the first version) at $50 000 (if this seems high, keep in mind that this is mostly wages). Granted, this is only for a basic first version, but still a far cry away from the $100 000 in the article. Assuming you ship at least ten before version two, it would be more like $5000.
It would be nice to know where the plane is and why. However, crashes happen so infrequently
that spending billions of dollars and not preventing a single one -- merely accelerating the speed
at which we get the "black box" data is not worth it.
Everyone involved including the airline industry has decided that it's not worth the expense
to spend $100,000 per airplane as well as untold costs to maintain that, and pass the costs
onto your relatives.
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370.
I just did.
E
Well, more specifically, why airlines won't install this device unless they're made to do it... and they won't.
If you were Malaysian Airlines right now you might wish you had one of these devices installed on the plane because it would resolve much of the public relations headache they are currently facing by letting them know NOW what was happening to that plane before it disappeared.. But that's about all it would save them. It won't save them anything else.
An airline is only going to want to install such a device if it directly benefits them financially and this device offers very little.
I doubt the FAA is going to require US carriers to install it because it offers very little the black boxes don't offer. It doesn't happen very often that a black box is unreadable or unrecoverable after a crash. It happens, but probably not often enough for installation of this device to be worth the cost and the trouble, especially that when those boxes are unavailable investigators have almost always been able to figure out what went wrong by using other evidence.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
I teach at a UK university. And today I was teaching a class of PR students (95% female) and they were discussing the crash this afternoon. some thought of some bermuda triangle type incident. others about how they've been kidnapped by some foriegn state or alien race. some pointed to the fact that 'the phones are still ringing' - to which i explained that the last known cell contact point is trying to contact the phone and just suppling a 'ringing tone' and i demonstrated by pulling battery out of my phone and getting them to call it (result- ring tone).
i unfortunately dont think i conviced anybody it was some kind of catastrophic failure.
then they showed me a video on youtube of girl emptying their handbag, which has over 1.5 million views.
At this point i felt like throwing myself off the building.
How many airlines had to be hijacked before they fortified the cockpit door? Or are they still made out of paper?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
To be fair, had they made that investment all those people would still be no less dead.
The problem is a lot more complicated than the article makes it to be. Of course, the obvious issue is that, whatever ended up causing the plane to crash may also take out the the monitoring device of at least impact its ability to transmit data. If we are going to truly rely on an equipment like this, it would have to be certified to the highest possible standards. In addition, the Iridium satellite network is great but good luck transmitting data in case of bad weather conditions. Granted, most planes are flying well above the clouds and connection should be pretty good. However, wouldn't we also need data for the period of time the plane fell below the cloud cover? Depending on the type of accident, the plane can still fly for quite a while under the clouds before it crashes. So at the end, this device may not make it that might easier to find the plane once it crashe into the ocean. Even worse, what if the plane is spinning on its way down and the antenna is not facing the sky for long enough? Good luck getting a satellite lock under these conditions. I just don't think that this device is the silver bullet the article makes it out to be.
Would such a device have really made a difference? Currently it looks like one of two scenarios, either someone commandeered the plane (growing increasingly unlikely) and disabled all of the communications systems or there was a sudden catastrophic failure that either destroyed the plane in midair or crippled all of its systems. I find it highly unlikely that this system could upload a meaningful amount of data through a satellite connection (not known for their reliability) in such a short time if it was a catastrophic failure or if it was a failure of all systems who's to say that it wouldn't have taken out such a device as well.
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370.
Ok, I'll tell them: Sorry we're too cheap to foot the bill and this is an obvious puff piece by a PR company to convince us all we need to spend millions (billions over time) to outfit every commercial plane with this device.
I don't understand the reliance on active communication from the plane. Aren't all flights tracked by ground radar? Surely there were military craft or bases in the area that were tracking it?
today is spelling optional day.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A telemetry buoy would serve to preserve the data and mark where the plane went down.
Stop trying to force industries to install unnecessary safety equipment that will push up the price of my airplane tickets because of a one in a billion event.
Worldwide, thousands (probably millions) of people turn up missing every year - it's sad, but true. The number of people who would be found significantly sooner by this device probably averages around a couple dozen per year. What makes those people worth spending billions of dollars on?
It's more likely you could use that same money to find a lot more than a couple dozen people by spending it more intelligently. The only thing that makes these people special is that they were rich enough to afford trans-pacific plane tickets, and they're in the news. If you think that makes them more important than other people, then YOU are the one barely attached to human reality.
The only really key piece of information we're missing is the plane's location. Once we have that, we can retrieve the black box(es) and we'll have all the rest of the information that there is to be had, as well.
The plane (like all commercial planes) had a device installed that effectively "uploaded" that key piece of information at regular intervals: its transponder. For some reason, the transponder failed; is there any reason to think that this device would not have failed as well, given the same circumstances?
Maybe all we really need is a more robust transponder.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Countries are not !
Even the USA does not require GPS or GNSS in large commercial aircraft systems: Fault Boing on that.
Drunken and drugged-up Flight Crews are part-n-parcle of the the Air Transport Industry.
Hay ! Who is the fucker who doesn't fly with a passport ? Answer: His Excellency Her Majesties Ship Barak Hussein Obama President of the Untied States of America !
Snicker snicker !
I'm glad the CIA infiltrated the computes of the Senate "Intelligent" Oversight Committee !
Now Diane Feinstein's and her husband's financial holding and transactions with Iranian companies can be exposed !
Presidential Kill Order Wished. [Barak does NOT have the guts to do this !]
PS. NSA ... are your ... "listening" ? This is important.
That is a Damn dangerous idea, its one thing to stream to a ground station but a local copy needs to be stored PERIOD a remote copy opens up the door to Blatant fraud. everything suddenly becomes pilot error.
What the could have used was a $0.50 device called a radio and a $10 device called a GPS. I mean seriously, what the fuck.
If the plane suffered a break up at cruising altitude, plenty of floating debris would have already been found. If it were a gradual failure, there would be plenty of time to make a Mayday call. Someone with malicious intent could force the crew to turn off the transponder and even force the crew to send the plane down, but the cockpit doors are locked during flight. Maybe the one with malicious intent was already in the cockpit. The copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, seems less than professional.
(||) Nehmo (||)
(because there would be eyewitnesses to any crashes)
Except for the last plane on either side.
How about 3 in a V formation, and the middle one has a terrorist on it with a couple pounds of C4 in his underwear... and next thing you know the plane explodes and fragments of wing and airplane body fly off and damage the two planes flying behind causing them to also crash. So there's no eyewitnesses left, and 3 planes down instead of just one?
Or maybe, like the last Air France airliner to go down, there isn't even time to put out a proper mayday as they're fighting to control the plane (through their own fault or others), but it only breaks up when it hits the floor.
That particular plane had three experienced crew on board, and crashed because someone was holding a control stick back for ages and nobody ever noticed. But it didn't get to put out a mayday, the onboard systems weren't transmitting enough data to highlight the problem to anyone else, and even when the blackboxes were recovered (how long later?), it still wasn't 100% clear quite WHY what happened happened.
Rather than turn everything into a terrorist story, which is just boring when you live in a country that's suffered terrorism for a long longer than the US latest overblown episode, how about we don't pot-shot at people's reputations?
And, to be honest, the whole link you post is really a non-story. Wow. I can remember going to a cabin on an aircraft and getting photos when I was a kid. Back then you could smoke on planes (probably still can in many countries - malaysia's laws? I'm not sure off-hand). But, no, fuck it, he has to be a terrorist to you?
Maybe it was a fucking crash.
Sad. Unfortunate. Unpredictable.
But doesn't do precisely what terrorism is supposed to do - PUT SO MUCH TERROR INTO YOU THAT YOU THINK EVERYTHING IS MORE TERRORISM.
The copilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, seems less than professional
When I was a kid, that's what all the cool captains did. And the cool kids got to go up there and watch.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I have a friend at Pratt Whitney who consults for Korea Air. Quite a bit of engine-related maintenance data is already streamed from the plane to the arrival airport, but I'm not sure at what point this starts. Sometime during descent I think. The idea is to give ground maintenance people a heads up on any issues needing attention before the next take-off.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
I still don't get how this would help a plane that vanished, a la LOST or Flight 93 or even farther back to the X-Files. If someone or something want's to make a plane disappear, some stupid ass box isn't going to help no matter how cool the angel investors think the technology is and putting a price tag on it isn't helping. Oh yeah, lets reverse every gun death in the country by arming all our citizens, its only $400 each!! Fuck the NRA and fuck anybody who thinks somebody screwed up for not buying some dumb ass super black box. Eat a disk.
In the words given to simple jack, you have gone full retard. Fuck lets fly 20 jets in a row, ass to mouth style and hope at least half the passengers make it to their destination alive. Its a win, win.
I remember when our Marine Corps KC-130's had such outdated radar, Our Naviguesser who was an enlisted person had to plot everything by paper.
Then they retrofitted several of our KC-130's with new GPS devices. WOW 100 times more accurate and several years latter got rid of the Navigator.
Very little was done to the aircraft to implement it and in fact I believe we reused the existing wiring from our Radar unit and spliced different connectors to plug in the GPS device.
It was 4 times smaller took up less space and it was so freaking reliable they never broke.
Just strap a fucking Go Pro on the damn Airplanes they seem just as indestructible as a Black box and they float!
These are the same airlines who were told in the late 1970's to install reinforced cockpit doors due to increased hijackings.
It's too expensive! They all exclaimed. 4 aircraft destroyed during 9/11 and I don't remember the number of lives.
But they have the audacity to charge extra for baggage fees and whatever else they feel like tacking on.
Now we all pay for the high school push out TSA Grope agents feeling up your wife and taking X-rays pics of your kids.
Fucking airlines When they invent transporter technology I am going to beam a fucking dildo up each CEO's ass! and all the TSA agents.
Firstly the airline industry tend to be very conservative. Secondely, I seriously doubt we are speaking of a 100K$ TOC. They say 100K$ to fit the device, which does not take into account potential downtime due to retrofitting. Also count that some airlines have fleets of 100 of flights, we are speaking of 10 of millions of dollar *just installing* not even infrastructure to receive data, tests, and so forth. In an industry quite strapped for cash. To catch data more conveniently in case of plane falling. When there is already a functionning *robust*, *tested*, technology, the BB. But even if you did it at the next maintenance, if you read the RTFA it states the streaming would only starts at abnormal events. Well woopy doo. It is far too late at that point you want to know what led to the abnormal event, because this is what you want to avoid in the future.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This is the 21st century, this kind of thing dose not happen.
But really, 1 flight out of millions go missing, and suddenly we need this device. And who is to say a hijacker can't find a way to disable that too?
I guess if everyone shouts for it, put them in, and add $5 to everyone's ticket to pay for it. 100K for the device, to keep it working, and whatever is needed on the ground to receive and store all that data, along with employees and buildings to keep it going, all so that 1 in a million flight can be found. People go way overboard after a single incidence, I'm more afraid of an airplane crashing then being hijacked. And who cares about this device is that happens, I'd be dead, I don't care how it went down.
The author lives in such a connected world apparently it doesn't even enter his mind that it's possible for a radio link to go off-line. But that's exactly what happened with this particular flight. Back to the drawing board.
How can anybody "turn up missing"?
No sig today...
When ducks fly in V formation, the legs of the v's aren't always of identical length. In this case, you'd have one leg of length zero and one of length one.
Guy was pitching them in my city recently. Said "put these reflectors on buses and save lives" they were nothing special. Just bits of shiny plastic.
His game was ambulance chasing people that got hit by buses and then demanding that the city install HIS little bits of shiny plastic. Anyone that disagreed clearly wanted everyone to be killed by undetectable buses because they didn't have his shiny reflectors.
It was a scam. As to this air plane thing... if they installed everything someone pitched at them the planes would be too heavy to fly. Lets be reasonable. These crashes are unusual and crashes you can't find quickly are extremely unusual. Just deal with it. the world isn't a perfect place.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yo, the families of passengers on Flight MH370! The industry has decided that fancy new device is not worth the expense.
Happy now?
That'll be $99880.00
it's easy to say, 'only $100K', but having to fit a complete fleet of planes makes it a very expensive extra, especially with the financial problems the sector already has..
But then again, why would a system like that cost a $100K, I can't believe a 'simple' satelite telephone would be sufficient to stream the data to a basestation, hell it also can be used then to monitor the plane when it goes off the radar..
But people making claims that it 'only' costs $100K are OR selling the device OR are really ignorant in what it actually costs to outfit a whole fleet of planes with those..
"Of course, that wouldn’t yield much information if a plane is blown out of the sky by a bomb, or suffers a sudden catastrophic structural failure at cruising altitude. But in those rare cases, conventional black boxes are really the only viable technology."
If a plane disappears without so much as a mayday, then it means it was a catastrophic failure of some kind. Do the authors think that when that plane was going down pilots just couldn't be bothered to contact ground and say something was wrong? It had to be an instakill to all critical systems or we wouldn't be wondering why the plane went down. And if it was an instakill the device wouldn't have been of any use anyway. So whats the point?
Or maybe, like the last Air France airliner to go down, there isn't even time to put out a proper mayday as they're fighting to control the plane (through their own fault or others), but it only breaks up when it hits the floor.
That particular plane had three experienced crew on board, and crashed because someone was holding a control stick back for ages and nobody ever noticed. But it didn't get to put out a mayday, the onboard systems weren't transmitting enough data to highlight the problem to anyone else, and even when the blackboxes were recovered (how long later?), it still wasn't 100% clear quite WHY what happened happened.
If I recall the data transmitted from the onboard systems had them guessing it was related to the pitot tube(s) icing over causing the autopilot to mishandle things (not getting correct airspeed), and with all the avionics (mostly 'fly-by-wire') were handing things poorly because of the readings it was getting (and mis-reporting to the pilots). Not sure it was 100% but they made changes to the pitot tube design I believe after.
About one hundred people die /per day/ in road accidents in the US alone, so by your "there's always something better this money could be spent on" argument, we should abandon pretty much every aeroplane safety measure and concentrate it on road safety. Yeah, it'll mean more aeroplane deaths, but your hypothetical utilitarian bullshit (which ignores that most social problems don't have simple technical solutions) will reduce overall deaths. It is airline responsibility because they're the ones providing the service - they're not responsible for the "probably millions" of people who turn up missing, nor for road accidents, etc. etc.
The "billions" argument is nonsense from the get-go because not every single aircraft would be involved in the sort of flight where this equipment would be of benefit, and economy of scale would bring the price down if every relevant aircraft would need outfitting. What is more, we're talking a few cents per ticket over the life of the aircraft: you might as well ask, "Are the shareholders so important that they're worth the closure of all the grieving relatives of the lives of two dozen people?"
I don't think they're more or less important than any other person, but I have a notion of responsibility for one's actions. The airliners aren't responsible for all missing people in the world, but they are responsible for people who go missing when their craft crashes.
I'll never understand Slashdot's attitude toward humanity, I really won't. But this is why I left the geek world behind - it has an almost fanatical devotion to over-simplified models.
drop very small, cheap, floating beacons off planes if everything else goes wrong? They can place these things through out everywhere in the plane. They can even record data with these until the very last minute. One can even construct something like this with less than 100 bucks with rPi or similar stuff.
If you want to help find the missing plane, head over to http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014?source=malaysia
Given that even the transponder stopped responding, I suspect this device would have also stopped transmitting at the same time...
simple ... a V have at least 3 points... now take one out on the ends... you get a \ or a / :)
It's not a Literal V, but it is still a V formation!
Higuita
When someone can't English very good.
how often does this happen .... like once every 10 years? 100k per plane is alot.
The CEO of this piece of shit hardware gains a lot! And that's the real story here.
ACARS, google it. It seems for some reason this plane was ACARS capable but it was not switched on.
what the fuck is up with these websites that make their font 300% larger than normal!?!?
When they are Welsh. It's a common idiom amongst the Welsh to say things like "And there it was! Gone!"
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Fuck slashdot and their Slashvertisements. Head over to AltSlashdot.org
You're complaining about advertising and giving your own advertisement. Irony meter pegged at 11.
The best answer I've seen as to what happened: this was a failed take-over of the plane (suicide attack, not high-jacking). It didn't work, so no one is going to claim responsibility (along with not tipping their hand at future attempts). And as it went into the sea at speed nearly perpendicular, not much of a debris field, just like the Airbus out of South America a few years ago.
Nobody seems to have mentioned that *pilots* would/might resist the streaming of flight data to the ground. As I understand it, there's a button in the cockpit which erases the flight deck voice recordings, and that button is one of the first things that the captain presses when the plane has landed.
What's said on the flight deck, stays on the flight deck!
No, I've lived in america all my life. I thought it was a common phrase, like saying you could "wake up dead" tomorrow.
simple: parallell to each other but not side by side. one of them slightly behind. get it?
Of course, that wouldn’t yield much information if a plane is blown out of the sky by a bomb, or suffers a sudden catastrophic structural failure at cruising altitude. But in those rare cases, conventional black boxes are really the only viable technology.
What makes those people worth spending billions of dollars on?
Ask the TSA.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's more likely you could use that same money to find a lot more than a couple dozen people by spending it more intelligently. The only thing that makes these people special is that they were rich enough to afford trans-pacific plane tickets, and they're in the news. If you think that makes them more important than other people, then YOU are the one barely attached to human reality.
I enjoy class warfare at times, but you are just dead wrong here in two ways. First of all, the flight was going from Malaysia (I assume Kuala Lumpur) to Beijing. This is not a "trans-pacific" flight. Second, as someone who is hardly rich and has actually flown trans-pacific, the flights are expensive but not insanely so. It is possible for average people to afford to fly such routes.
The most likely reason it has not been implemented is cause it is sensitive data and sending it around makes it insecure.... and don't give me shit about ways to secure it, cause as soon as you can send it somewhere, security has less value then the shit I take during the day!
This is the industry that barely pays Best BUY wages to the pilots. They will not spend money on something like a black box transmitter. Although $100K is outrageous for a simple satellite phone data link. How about a simple iridium phone + GPS that simply sends the gps coordinates of the plane every 30 seconds? this would have been far more useful and can be build for $1500 even with FAA certification and hardening.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> A device will work only if it's well maintained.
This much is true. And now look what has happened, without proper maintenance we sit here now before this disaster.
> We are talking about a plane that is owned by Malaysia
what plane? You replied to a post about the hawking of a product using some of the most "tell that to the families" scumbag tactics.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Statistically speaking planes do not crash, with only a small margin of error.
To improve human safety new cars should have a black box type feature. Just loop the last few minutes of speed+brake+steering+blinker status through a storage. It would help point out culprits faster which would force people to drive better.
Cars crash all the time, but because it is not newsworthy nobody notices. The number of deaths per passenger mile for cars is far more than for planes, so why invest at all to make the planes safer? That's like investing in a lightning rod to protect your electronics while there is no front door in the frame to protect against theft.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Let's say more like $1,000, a much higher cost than for a consumer SPOT transmitter. Rather than stream everything, just transmit the GPS coordinates. Where the trail ends is where the search begins. Commercial trucks and trains are tracked, why not airliners? It's not a privacy issue, as it might be on a private aircraft.
The only way I can think of (heading towards each other) wouldn't work so well.
Wouldn't the primary value of streaming failure data be ensuring that it was not lost & could be used to avoid repetition of the failures identified via the data? How many planes are lost annually, the loss of which could have been avoided by having such data? Apparently not enough to justify another $100k per airplane in service. If enough airplanes crashed per unit time and rates of future crashes could be reduced sufficiently by having data that would otherwise have been lost, the airlines' bean counters would insist on adding $100k to the price of each airplane.
Aren't they imploding over some ego tantrums? You could check out, http://technocrat.net/, http://squte.com/ or https://pipedot.org/ if you're looking for a site that actually works.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Rather have $100k spent on not crashing.
Some planes have WiFi even over the sea. Bolt a humble smartphone to a bulkhead and install an app to send a squirt of data every five minutes. Phones require neglible maintenance and can contain GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope and battery backup in the event of power failure. A 3,499 Rupee phone costs far less than 100,000 Dollars and paying in Rupees generates wealth for a poorer country. At this price bung in a couple more to achieve triplex redundancy.
Worldwide, thousands (probably millions) of people turn up missing every year - it's sad, but true.
If you turn up, are you really missing?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
You just need to report the anomalies, and perhaps the telemetry shortly before and afterwards. You don't need a constant stream.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
That's the best way to proceed. Ask the person who has recently suffered an extreme loss, who won't be paying for the decision with his own money. What could go wrong?
I wonder how much money has been spent so far on the search?
These planes already broadcast their position using ADS-B. Although while over the ocean they're out of range of normal terrestrial receivers, I'm 99% sure that spy satellites with their fancy SDR receivers and high sensitivity are capable of receiving all ADS-B transmissions in the world. Of course a system like that would mean admitting to capabilities that governments don't like to admit to.
Unless they survived the water crash and were in a life boat but succumbed to exposure on the open ocean...In which case it would save quite a few lives. See how easy it is to use conjecture without facts?
If you are really outraged there is a simple solution, have a donation box. Make it hip accept Bitcoin and Litecoin. Put in on the company web page. Bitcoin for Safety is the headline. When the passengers have paid a 100k +enough to keep the escrow account open. Install a device on the airplane. I am sure when people realize the benefits of flight data streaming they will be more then happy to pay for it. A little at a time say 1/25th of a bit coin at a time. Oh wait, they wont pay because people wont pay for it. So it really isn't worth it. The 'greedy' company s are right. Prove me wrong.
Create a Twitter account for each plane. Have it send a tweet with basic location data and status every 15 minutes.
Because idioms happen and they confuse the shit out of faux pedants.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Currently *I* am working with insufficient information to convict anybody of deliberately downing the plane, but Malaysia Airlines has much more information, and, given their politician-like rebuff of concerns about the copilot's past behavior (We won't be "distracted", and "We have not been able to confirm the validity of the pictures"), the airline's sincerity is questionable.
The incident of the copilot on this missing flight having had on a previous flight invited two women to stay in the cockpit for the duration of the previous flight is hardly, as you describe it, a "non-story". Even Malaysia Airlines says they are "shocked" by the allegations. The flight crew is supposed to be working on the serious task of flying a large passenger plane. They are not supposed to be using their privileged position as a means to impress girls they want to pick up. If they want to do that, they can do so on their own time in their own planes.
As you can see by the story, distraction is possible. And a distraction in an emergency could be fatal. And who is the un-named pilot, who also allowed the girls, by the way?
They also smoked tobacco in the cockpit. This is prohibited by the Airline and by Malaysia's laws (assuming the plane is "public transport"). Since you, ledow, included a personal antidote to support your "non story" claim, it's fair for me to also offer one: I don't allow anybody on my own work crews to light up on the job. These are construction workers, incidentally.
(||) Nehmo (||)
It matters because my family, friends, and I can fly, and it could be us. So I care. More.
That is always the problem... We have the knowledge, the technology and all the materials needed, we have everything to put some good idea in practice... Problem? People say it's too expensive!...
What the hell? The problem is never the idea or what it takes to put it in practice, it's always lack of money or predisposition to do something new...
If you sell every stuff that exists in the world (and i mean everything) you get a value inferior to all the debt in the world... If you put our economic systems in basic sentences, you actually notice that they are just stupid... They're just there so some people own more stuff then others... It's just that...
To this specific problem i bet there are several different forces to not make this a reality... The blackbox companies, the airliners, the airports... even the guys in maintenance won't probably wan't them because they have to get a course on how to handle and install these new systems... I mean change is just too much for many people...
Basically we don't make things because we're either misers or slackers... It's that simple! And the more you have the more miser you'll be, the less you do the more slacker you'll be... Two sides of the same coin...
Instead of wasting 100K per plane for this device that wont save anyone, how about using those 100K to have parachutes available in every plane underneath every seat - this certainly would save more lives compared to 0 saved lives for this device.
That is always the problem... We have the knowledge, the technology and all the materials needed, we have everything to put some good idea in practice... Problem? People say it's too expensive!... What the hell? The problem is never the idea or what it takes to put it in practice, it's always lack of money or predisposition to do something new... If you sell every stuff that exists in the world (and i mean everything) you get a value inferior to all the debt in the world... If you put our economic systems in basic sentences, you actually notice that they are just stupid... They're just there so some people own more stuff then others... It's just that... To this specific problem i bet there are several different forces to not make this a reality... The blackbox companies, the airliners, the airports... even the guys in maintenance won't probably wan't them because they have to get a course on how to handle and install these new systems... I mean change is just too much for many people... Basically we don't make things because we're either misers or slackers... It's that simple! And the more you have the more miser you'll be, the less you do the more slacker you'll be... Two sides of the same coin...
for trans Atlantic and Trans Pacific flights... yes. Over land could use Ground Stations to receive and relay the data. but Yes it would be expensive.
But they could also turn up missing in due to any number of other causes! Only a tiny fraction of missing bodies are due to mid-ocean plane crashes - I still haven't heard why finding the corpses of a couple dozen such people per year is so much more important than finding the corpses of the thousands of other people that could be found by spending that same billion dollars more intelligently.
At this point we know this plane crashed somewhere. If it landed at an airport large enough for it to land without crashing, there'd be a record of it landing somewhere.
What this will would do is help people find the plane more quickly, but I can only think of a handful of times over the last several decades where there's been a plane that's gone outright missing like this. In the rare event where a plane has gone down, it's taken very little time to find nearly all of them.
So, $100k per plane, plus maintenance and fuel costs for an exceedingly rare event. Doesn't really seem worth it to me. Especially when you realize that search technology has greatly improved and situations like the one featured in Alive are much less likely now that drones can quickly survey relatively vast areas in a relatively efficient manner.
It's also worth noting that the radio was destroyed or rendered inoperable, so this technology probably would be broken anyways.
"Turned up missing."
People "turned up" the space where they were supposed to be, and it was empty.
It's a common phrase where I grew up...
No, that's a slash formation ;)
but over or near land generally planes are in constant communication with ground stations anyway, that's why crash sites are very quickly reached
gosgog:
I can't see the need. I have over 6800 hours, Pilot in command in some Old airplanes and though not airlines. Airliners are mostly in contact with "Center" at 30,000'+ or Terminal Control when on departure or arrival. So if all of a sudden there's a problem, they have dual folks or more in the cockpit, they have both Vocal and other electronic communication. If its hijacking there's a special communication takes 2 seconds to switch, if there's communication loss (mostly vocal) another 2 second frequency switch, and in many cases there's other electronic connection built into the aircraft. If there's mechanical or human physical problem, there's still glide, controlled or even uncontrolled (whatever) airplanes dont just disappear from altitude. The only instant disappearance I can figure is total disintegration! A massive explosion! producing little its very widely scattered....know what I mean??