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Why Are We Spending Billions and Tons of Fossil Fuel On Search of Lost Planes?
Reader Max_W asks: After days of massive search finally, "Report: Signals detected from EgyptAir Flight 804 in Mediterranean"
Why not record GPS/GLONASS track constantly into a text file on say twenty flash USB drives enclosed into orange styrofoam with the serial aircraft number on it? In case of an accident, these waterproof USB flash drives are released outside overboard. Certainly the text file is encrypted.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp; while an aircraft costs millions, and a search may costs billions let alone thousands of tons of burned fossil fuel.
Why not record GPS/GLONASS track constantly into a text file on say twenty flash USB drives enclosed into orange styrofoam with the serial aircraft number on it? In case of an accident, these waterproof USB flash drives are released outside overboard. Certainly the text file is encrypted.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp; while an aircraft costs millions, and a search may costs billions let alone thousands of tons of burned fossil fuel.
Then we can spend all that fuel looking for a piece of floating garbage. How in the hell did this get green-lighted?
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
"Why not record GPS/GLONASS track constantly into a text file on say twenty flash USB drives enclosed into orange styrofoam with the serial aircraft number on it? In case of an accident, these waterproof USB flash drives are released outside overboard. Certainly the text file is encrypted.
Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp; while an aircraft costs millions, and a search may costs billions let alone thousands of tons of burned fossil fuel."
Congrats, you just reinvented a black box and they don't always surface or float based on impact, depth of water, if it's caught in something or the blame hit with such violence that there wasn't much left.
Gotta make sure they're really dead before paying out.
Let's reinvent the wheel. It's not like we have anything better to do.
And love the jetset.
What about the Aircraft certified equipment that is required to write to and/or power the USB drives? It is very difficult to install a new device in an airplane, and new devices must go through a lot of testing. I also don't think it would be easy to find these USB drives. I think we just need better satelite coverage.
Send in the drones. Make them solar powered so they can loiter.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
1) You spend cash, you burn fuel. Trying to combine environmental concerns with this issue is a POOR idea. It's not a major cause of fossil fuel use, there are far better ways to reduce fossils fuels. These are two separate issues - a) fossil fuels and b) finding lost aircraft.
2) Your limited concept of a black box is clearly not the answer. It demonstrates ignorance about many of the issues involved, including weight, time, floating recovery, ejection from sinking aircraft, etc. A far simpler solution is to simply have all planes continuously broadcast their GPS location whenever they go below a certain altitude or descend too quickly. Have them broadcast using a satellite phone system that covers the ENTIRE world - including the oceans, of course. Yes this would require some new satellites - but it is a global problem that the UN could easily solve with money.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I would love to but please tell that to ICAO and the FAA and every other civil aviation regulatory authority on the planet. This has got to be some of the most clueless garbage I've seen on Slashdot in years, obviously from someone whose only experience with aerospace is as self-loading cargo. What we should be doing is extending ACARS and other technologies to stream critical information via satellite to relevant stakeholders at nearly all times and have authorities mandate its usage for carriers if they want to fly in their airspace. Sure, we can already do it now but it costs money and we don't do anything unless a regulator forces us to.
If we are playing this game, then why not have all that data being sent through a sat phone link real time?
...what deploys the USB drives?
You're stuck with a common dilemma - do you eject on a single failure and lose your entire record if there's an in-flight on on-the-ground anomoly? Do you have to have impact before failure, and if so what monitors the plane statistics when the main systems go down? Can you guarantee that the ejection would be safe AND effective (upside down - ejects into ground)?
The black boxes DO have radio beacons that aid in tracking, and they're a good bit better for tracking than the relying on visibility of a fist-sized piece of dayglo orange styrofoam with an led blinker.
You should look up "flight search and recovery" on Google - it will give you all the information you need to finish that 5th grade report on airplanes you're writing.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just Another Government Subsidy. Shouldn't the airlines have to pay for the cost of finding the wreckage of their planes? I think that would have some interesting effects on aircraft maintenance. Or - heh - you could choose the cheaper airline that takes the "shit happens" approach.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Why not require every plane to fly in tandem with some other plane? That way if one gets lost you have an external observer. You could even make one of the planes an entirely luxury first-class plane with a pool and huge windows, so the people from the other plane can watch the first class plane having a good time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This has got to be some of the most clueless garbage I've seen on Slashdot in years, obviously from someone whose only experience with aerospace is as self-loading cargo.
It could also be from a teenager trying to ask a legitimate question to a website full of smart people, or someone from an underdeveloped area who was taught about energy conservation but doesn't grasp the complexities of aircraft construction.
I'm not suggesting we be like StackExchange, but we're the smart people in the room and are known for +5 insightful posts that look at all sides of an issue.
The OP does have a point: we seem to spend a lot of time looking for planes when they go down, and there seems to be a lot of common-sense technological solutions that could be implemented.
I hear there are pilots and aircraft engineers on this site. Maybe we could, you know, discuss solutions?
This doesn't seem like it has much critical thought put into it. I'm also kinda wondering how it got posted with just some text in the summary instead of a real link to detail on what it's suggesting...
I don't think the question is bad. The solution is stupid. To me why does it have to be stored on the plane itself? Why can't it be transmitted in flight? Or giant mesh network between planes to swap data?
If mere citizens got to approve all the stupid stuff governments do, there wouldn't be much government left.
However, in the case of this poster I'm OK if he goes lost and no one bothers to look for him - the naivety it took to develop his original posting is truly Slashdot-worthy.
Why not just stream the data to a satellite while flying over water?
The technology is there. The engines stream data continuously (we know that from MH370).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Uh, if you go down that route, then how in the heck do you track/find the USB drive? The answer is luck. To make it more reliable and discoverable, then you'd need to remake the black box and that already exists.
The better solution is to hook up every plane -- any international flight at a minimum -- to ping a satellite with its GPS (et al) location, pitch, roll, yaw, altitude, air speed, and any other useful metric that they can think of. It should also have way to ping airport land towers (possibly just cellular towers by sending the signal 360 degrees downward) with the same metrics for redundancy.
This would give the most uptodate information, as well as power some very interesting, near real time flight modeling statistics and the best opportunity for doing predictive analysis when a plane goes missing. Chances are, as long as the system was isolated and not able to be turned off while the engines are on plus ~30 minutes after tripping the off switch (so if someone turns it off, it's only when the engines are off and if they stay of for 30 minutes), then it might even survive long enough to show debris tracking.
Here's a much better idea: just have the plane constantly online. The passengers will be happier anyway if they can access the internet from the 'comfort' of their seats, and the plane itself can log its location with HQ at any moment. Little telltale signs like, ohh, depressurisation, massive drops in altitude, etc. could immediately start a search and rescue operation, possibly before the impact has even taken place.
The technology is not only already there, it is in fact already installed on most planes anyway. The only thing missing is automatic and constant reporting of the planes' location.
a. Wealthy people fly a lot and they want to know it's safe. Wealthy people matter so we spend billions on the things that matter to them.
b. Airlines want everyone to know it's safe to fly so they won't think twice about flying. And it's not their money that's getting spent.
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Now let us just tweak it a little...
Sometimes airplane crashes are fiery, styrofoam burns easily, lets wrap them in a tough stainless steel shell.
Oh, when that shell gets hot, the styrofoam will melt, and the heat will destroy the flash drives. If we use a special wax instead the wax will absorb heat as it changes state, that will protect the drives.
Hmm, now they don't float, even if we wrap them in something floaty it may get burned/torn off in a crash. We could put an audio transducer in them, and when they get "unplugged" in a crash they could start automatically pinging.
But just having coordinates won't help us figure out why the plane crashed, lets record a bunch of environmental and control status on them as well.
Of course it would be nice to be able to cast some light on why the controls were in the state they were in, maybe we should record an audio stream from the cockpit as well.
Hey, that might be too much data for this single box, lets put 2 of them on the plane, one for enviro/mechanical status and location, and one for the human side of the equation.
Oh, wait.......
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
Flight recorders sit in the aircraft's tail - where they're ost likely to survive - and are built to be incredibly tough, to survive pretty much any accident.
But surely this is a hangover from the earlier era when data recording was done by things that were big, bulky and expensive. Therefore aircraft designers had no choice to put all their eggs in one (very very tough) basket.
Now data storage devices are tiny, why not have a system that disperses hundreds, each with a copy of the flight data, in the event of an accident? Sure they won't be individually as survivable, but who cares? It's the principle of the baby turtles making their way down the beach - a few are bound to make it.
Wow if this isnt the most shit article on /. to date.
impressive new low we've found /.
impressive indeed.
If it were Bennette, it would be 3-4 times the size of most of my economics comments.
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It still not change the SAR effort, you have to do it immediately on a chance of survivors thats your first 72 hours or so after that it's body recovery to give family closure.
No sir I dont like it.
I've never had trouble finding a 747 that I left laying around the house. USB drives, on the other hand -- I lose those son of a bitches all the damn time.
The submitter seems to think that a 2 inch USB drive will be easier to find than a 200 foot airplane.
On the other hand, the suggestion of a FLOATING auxiliary black box has been made seriously and isn't ridiculous. A challenge is that the device must reliably leave the airplane in case of a crash, but not be knocked loss by flying at 680MPH, or be dislodged by a rough landing at an airport.
I can't afford billions, nor do I have a role in allowing such spending.
The recorder has to survive a slew of different scenarios including impact and being submerged. It has to survive sheering forces from impact. The black box was created the way it is to survive all manners of damage and environments. Styrofoam would not survive and if it did, the USB sticks would not. Not to mention USB sticks are not the most reliable storage medium for this style of data.
May I introduce you to punctuation?
Your post was so difficult to read without it. I had to reread it about 5 times to figure out where the missing punctuation was supposed to be.
Airliners are already required to have ELTs - Emergency Locator Transmitters. When a plane crashes, the impact activates the ELT, which (in the better models) transmits its GPS coordinates to satellites. There's no need to stick flash drives into foam hoping someone will physically recover the device to learn its location.
The problem with water crashes is that you don't know how the plane will crash into the water, so it's tough to design a mechanism which will survive a crash and reliably release a floating ELT. If the ELT sinks under a few mm of seawater, that effectively blocks the signal. Also, the impact with the water may not be as hard as with ground, and the ELT may not be activated at all. The problem is much easier on boats, and most sailors get one which will release and start transmitting if the boat should sink.
We would still spend massive amounts of fuel and other resources(as we should) recovering the bodies. Plus there is the desire to recover debris for research and evidence purposes.
Whoever floated this idea (snicker) has no idea of scale when it comes to how big the Earth is in general and the oceans particularly are.
...maybe with some dose of self-buoyancy, too.
It's obviously way more complicated than the armchair designer can imagine, but I wonder if:
1) The black box could be made to be ejected in the case of an airplane crash
2) Made buoyant somehow so that it will float once ejected
3) Configured with a GPS receiver and logger so that when it was found, even if it had drifted many miles from the crash site, it would give a pretty good idea of where it crashed
(1) is probably a tougher condition than it sounds to define. The last thing you want is DL123 ejecting a fucking 10 pound black box randomly over a populated area. Maybe some kind of multiple-monitoring setup in the black box of airplane systems combined with a 30 minute delay and cockpit warning of pending ejection so it can be aborted before it ends up embedded in someone's attic. Of course there's no guarantee the section housing it will be oriented in a way that allows for ejection -- it may get stuck or eject into the seabed.
(2) This seems like it shouldn't be that hard, maybe like a self-inflating lifejacket.
(3) This seems also less than hard if you can get the thing to ejected and floated to the surface.
How about keeping the system as is, but provide a secondary "black box" which contains a duplicate record. Any flight staff would be able to hit a button (placed in several different areas throughout the plane) to eject the secondary black box in the event that they knew they were in trouble.
The secondary black box would have a GPS tracking system, floatation, etc etc
If they accidentally eject it... oh well, not THAT big of a deal and we still have the primary system.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
On the other hand, the suggestion of a FLOATING auxiliary black box has been made seriously and isn't ridiculous. A challenge is that the device must reliably leave the airplane in case of a crash, but not be knocked loss by flying at 680MPH, or be dislodged by a rough landing at an airport.
From what I've seen of airplanes hitting the water at full tilt, getting things to leave them isn't really all that difficult. But, why not take it a step further and design a mechanism to jettison a copy of the black box data and a locator beacon before impact? Say at about 500 ft above ground/water level while on a downward slope at any location not in the vicinity of an airport, per onboard GPS, or immediately upon 'X' G's outside of a survivable impact (rough landing).
Why not just record all flight data to an iPhone? And then when the plane crashes, you use "Find my iPhone" and boom!, you've located the crash site.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
We're not looking for planes - we're looking for people.
Water soluble glue?
Perhaps then take a course in linquistics? It only took me one read through to note where the punctuation should have been.
Always connected with gps always being logged offsite
oh! no! somebody on the internets didn't use good punctuation!!!!
But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport?
Homing pigeons would me much faster... And we could use them as pets inside the cabin :)
Once in trouble you just open the window and set the pigeons free... What could possibly go wrong...
... the OP didn't wedge how sexist and racist the "black box" is as well. Might as well aim for the Angry Studies trifecta.
Everybody is having lots of fun poking at the dumbness of the USB drive solution - and I'll admit, it's really bad. That said, the question is legitimate.
In an age of GPS and satellite data connectivity, why the hell are we still able to lose 747s? You can buy a device right now that will use the satphone network to phone home with your location from anywhere in the world. It's $120. This would have saved a millions of dollars and much of the endless speculation on the Malaysian Airlines flight that disappeared without a trace. If you purpose-built one for the exact needs of the airline industry, I'm sure you could send something like 1-minute pings with all the most critical info - position, orientation, speed, basic status - it's completely ridiculous that we have to search the ocean manually for even the simplest of clues about what happened.
And before objecting that the satellite network doesn't have bandwidth for doing this on a large scale - a text message once per minute would be worlds better than what we have now for planes outside of radar range (that would be... nothing) and anyhow we've got the next-gen Iridium network set to fly very soon, with many other satellite constellations in the works for high-bandwidth global data connections. There are no technical barriers to implementing a simple satellite-based plane tracking system.
Just have a buddy drone follow
rain?
Fossil fuel do no any good just lying in the ground. Use them up!
Spent a few hundred $ per year for a global satellite based position reporting system.
(See Spot or InReach)
Then just go to the web site to see where's my plane.
Even to FAA standards for the equipment, this is not that hard.
There is no reason for any commercial airplane to not afford world wide continuous 2 minute position reporting to a central site.
Attach it underneath the wing.
At the bottom of the
How about non-stop streaming the info?
Because it's bloody obvious that the submitter doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
Perhaps the submitter shouldn't assume that people who design vehicles weighing hundreds of tons, moving hundreds of MPH and carrying hundreds of people thousands of miles are fucking idiots.
Where the hell did the submitter get the number 20 USB drives?
If you have the drives, you have the approximate position of the aircraft.
How do you expect to find the drives, and not the aircraft, do you know how be an aircraft is in respect to an aircraft?
Why the hell do you want to encrypt the drives? Don't you want the people who find the drives to be able find the damn plane as quickly as possible?
Don't you think Styrofoam is a bad idea in case of fire or serious impact?
Those things have to be plugged in to record data, you really think the connectors are gonna survive major impact?
How about instead we have an impact resistant, fire resistant device that transmits a radio signal upon crashing. And another device that records all of the flight data, including cockpit discussions? Oh wait, aircraft already have these.
I thought such a thing already existed, but isn't mandated by FIFA (or whoever it is that's in charge) so nobody uses it because $$$.
At the bottom of the
> From what I've seen of airplanes hitting the water at full tilt, getting things to leave them isn't really all that difficult.
Sometimes. Other times it's gentler than the average landing at O'Hare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> Say at about 500 ft above ground/water level while on a downward slope at any location not in the vicinity of an airport
Typically, at 500 feet, an landing airliner will be about a mile and half from one end of the runway, about three miles from the center of the airport. So we might say you're not "near an airport" if you're least six miles from the center of an airport; sound about right? At the moment, there are two commercial airports within six miles of me, and at least two private airfields. At the last place I lived, in another town, there were also two airports within six miles. That's about typical - probably most places in the US have a commercial airport or two within six miles, and a couple of private airfields.
Not that it can't be done, it's just non-trivial.
Deicing?
Why? Because we are humans...silly little bags full of thousands of chemical reactions that manifest themselves as irrational, emotional responses. We can justify and rationalize damned near anything: genocide, war, letting people starve to death, etc. So we look for the plane because through those chemical reactions we feel an emotional connection (empathy/sympathy) to those missing and their loves ones. We want to rescue survivors, recover victims, and give closure to those family members left behind. One can argue the nobility of this. Granted, if those same missing persons were diametrically opposed to "our" political/religious persuasions at the time, we'd be just as likely to bomb them as look for them. Humanity. Go figure. By god, I'm feeling snarky and cynical this Friday!
> Attach it underneath the wing.
Because rain falls from above? A rain drop does fall on your head from above, at about 20 MPH. Meanwhile, the aircraft is running into the rain drops at 680 MPH. The rain doesn't fall on to the aircraft, the aircraft rams into the rain drops. The rain comes from straight ahead. And with 680 MPH relative wind, the water is blown across the full surface of the aircraft.
A place with a bunch of idiots that derp about "SJWs" is "leftdot," or you're a stupid, hate-fueled reactionary? Which is more likely?
Soon clueless jerks like you won't be able to have your foolish beliefs reinforced anywhere but hate-radio and wingnut blogs that were built to manipulate yahoos like you into voting for destructive idiots.
Good luck with your inverse-meritocracy, I'm sure it'll end well.
I'm actually a bit surprised that there isn't some sort of redundant system installed in the black boxes that detects large amounts of pressure (from being, say, deep underwater) and pressurizes a flotation balloon around the black box.
Or perhaps it's just unfeasible for a multitude of reasons.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
W-T-literal-F, editors? News for nerds? Stuff that matters?
Who is Max_W and why should I care about his black box replacement idea? Is he an expert in aviation safety? Is he a search and recovery worker? Is he an aerospace engineer working for Boeing or Airbus or even Embraer? Is he a regulator with the FAA? An NTSB investigator? Or is he just some random poster whose idle musings you've turned into an article?
Imagine all the people...
We're not looking for the plane to find where it went. That's a side benefit. We're looking for the plane to find out what the hell went wrong so we can keep it from happening to other planes. One reason air travel is safer now is that we've fixed the design problems on previous models as we've seen failures. Most failures now are extreme edge cases, and we've pushed those edges further and further back with each crash.
Rudder locks at 500 knots in 45% humidity? Fix it on all of them. Fuel line can be severed by black cat wearing pants on a Tuesday? Put in a warning light. Crash due to pilots turning off the engines too soon? Change the procedures, put in an altitude aware engine kill lockout. These are stupid, of course, but that's the basic theory. It's the whole point of crash investigation.
It's tragic when we lose a plane, but we're not looking for that plane. We're trying to save the lives of future passengers on the same model or in the same situation.
The engineering solution to anchoring a floating black box exists. It lies in a combination of a structural mounting using sodium metal sealed in nitrogen (or some other structural material that fails rapidly when exposed to salt water), with the seal structure designed to fracture or implode if the plane submerges more than 100m underwater. If a 747 crashes in shallow water, detection and retrieval are relatively easy, it is these deep water crashes that are difficult to detect and recover.
The sad truth is that the FAA, Boeing and Airbus are fossilized, inflexible behemoths of bureaucracy incapable of innovation or forward thinking (just look at the mess surrounding the FAA and drones). The issue is not a technical one, it is one of getting thousands of idiot bureaucrats to sign off without trying to sabotage it for their own petty reasons.
Maybe more than one "secondary" flight audio recorder and flight data recorder, where both the audio stream and data stream from the two expensive boxes (CVR and FDR) are propagated to a number of secondary, relatively inexpensive devices. The little devices would record a GPS log when something happened (similar to how a modern car's computer records stuff when a wreck happens), save their GPS position on accident time, and have some way of passively floating around with that data.
It would be nice to have a number of devices, which would be relatively small, and would auto-deploy an auto-inflating balloon behind them. This way, they will find their way -somewhere- eventually, similar to the shipping crate of rubber ducks wound up in various places.
Of course, there would be design issues, like a connector that is breakaway, potting the electronics in epoxy so they can take potentially years floating in the ocean, but still have storage media that can be retrieved, designing a floatation device, and so on. At least someone, somewhere would find those. As it stands now, if the FDR and CVR are lost, only thing you have is the carcass of the plane (and its passengers) to guess with.
I'm picturing perhaps a CO2 canister to fill the balloon, since a lot of CO2 can fit in a small canister (at high pressure, 852 PSI).
> detects large amounts of pressure (from being, say, deep underwater
So the trigger mechanism detects the pressure from being deep underwater, 7,000 PSI. It releases the seal on the CO2 canister that's at 852 PSI. The water pressure forces the balloon INTO the CO2 canister.
You can't really plan on doing ANYTHING after the aircraft has come to rest deep underwater and it's under 7,000 PSI of pressure, I don't think. Any mechanical action needs to take place during the (potentially violent) crash.
Only an SJW or a homosexual would vote this down. Really. Real men use gas-powered stuff. I'm so very tired of all the pantywaste girly men tree huggers.
20-50 miles from an airport might work, as long as the Apple Maps team doesn't code it. While most inhabited areas of the US and Europe are near an airport, it's not hard to find an airliner that crashed in the suburbs.
Really, it's the crashes over open ocean that are hard to find, where there are no airports within 50 miles. The cost would be reduced by only putting them on planes that actually fly over open ocean.
They can be hard to find in mountains too, but "500 feet altitude" is hard to define amongst 14,000 foot mountains.
They make them. They're called deployable black boxes and they basically eject from the aircraft and float on top of the water. With GPS locator beacon. Typically they're used for military aircraft, but they are used for civilian aviation as well.
Airbus is on board with equipping them, Boeing less so. Boeing's concern centers around accidental deployment - they estimate that there will be 6 or 7 deployments per year.
On the other hand, if your area is that developed, how likely is a crashed plane to be hard to find? To my knowledge, large plane crashes on land are not hard to find.
A floating black box, maybe 2-4 of them, that's designed to eject from the plane if it becomes immersed might be much more useful. While you're at it, put a satellite emergency beacon on them so you have a very good idea of where the plane hit the water.
I don't read AC A human right
I think they could set up a streaming system for GPS monitoring of all kinds of data from passenger positioning to food storage levels, but the black box systems are designed to survive some horrible conditions that no commercially available hardware will commit to surviving, and the cost of certifying new stuff would be enormous. The same reasoning applies to space craft, the older simpler hardware is more resilient and has been tested in ways new stuff simply hasn't been because of cost. When you require 6 sigma certainty cost skyrockets for that kind of reliability or redundancy.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You're an idiot.
Why is slashdot wasting our time with this idiotic bullshit?
With today's technology it should be possible for a plane to carry a capsule with a few drones that could be parachuted if released above certain height, then the drone can be released from a capsule and the drones could be using cameras to take pictures, send SOS signals, record GPS and other data, like wind speed and direction, etc.
You can't handle the truth.
Or you could just report back your geographic coordinates via satellite communications every five minutes or so. This could be done by a low power battery backed up transmitter that would continue to run (at very low wattage) even when the fuse is pulled. Breitling makes a watch that transmits your GPS position via satellite, so we're not talking about doing something that requires massive li-ion batteries here. It could run off a very safe, current-limited NiMH battery pack that is vanishingly unlikely to cause a fire. The key is that nobody on board can stop the aircraft's position from being reported.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
An LED lamp on a USB drive won't be easy to find. You still have to search for lights floating on the water, which really doesn't save much effort. You'll still spend lots of money searching.
The problem is the emergency locator beacons. Those aren't going to work underwater, so you'll need to make those float, have stronger signals, and make them more reliable. That would solve the problem because once you detect a signal, you can find the origin from triangulation.
Shit weirdo kid who gets beaten and teased at school thinks he has a great idea nobody else ever came out with (because HE'SO SPECIAL OMG OMG) and promptly goes to a website full of other weirdos to have his crappy ideas validated. Surprise surprise, nerds do not band together. They do not stick together. They slapfight all the time and fling poo at each other to the merriment of us Cool Kids who, in due time, will step in and give them all a brown swirlie.
I'm thinking some sort of turtle tether for example...
I'd say that in crashes in which the position of the aircraft is so unclear that the search with current methods takes several days, the likelihood of survivors is practically zero. And if the aircraft disintegrates completely, what good does it do to find the transmitter when anyone who's survived is quite likely to be nowhere near it? Surviving the kind of crash in which the crew have no time to inform ATC let alone take any action to safely get to the ground is so unlikely that I don't see why it's worth considering. Sure, a couple of people have survived falling from cruise altitude but if resources are to be spent on improving crash survivability, there are a myriad of better options.
Sealed on the front, open vent on the back?
What would that do to airflow over the wing? If you only have one, attacked at the wing, wouldn't any impact to airflow become asymetrical - happening on only one wing, not the other, and if so, what would that do for flight dynamics?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
After AF447 and then again after MH370, the people who deal with stuff for a living have been discussing this. Well, not this kinda lame proposal, but the problem that it is trying to solve.
Here is a GAO report on the topic.
As far as the "fossil fuel" wasted on the search, a) as noted elsewhere, you want to search for survivors (JAL123, a 747, crashed into the side of a mountain and there were 4 survivors) and b) even if you know exactly where the plane went down, the fuel used to search is small compared to the fuel spent on recovery.
If only the Boeing engineers were as smart as you guys....and knew as much about air pressure and stuff like that.
No sig today...
I mean what harm could a box designed to survive an airplane crash possibly do when it ejects into an engine at take off...
You would be amazed at the stuff that doesn't get done for bureaucratic reasons, the things that engineers know that don't get put into practice - like: knowing that the O-Rings on the shuttle boosters are vulnerable to freezing pre-launch temperatures and could lead to a loss of vehicle incident, yeah, engineers knew that.
Sometimes, when the "unwashed masses" start crying out for the obvious, the "powers that be" start moving in the direction of doing something, they have far too much practice ignoring engineers' "good ideas" - less so fending off an angry mob asking them why they aren't doing the obvious.
Not only that, there is absolutely no piece of equipment that can go on plane for $100. This is due to FAA approvals necessary.
Congratulations, you just reinvented a shittier version of a black box. But I'm sure your idea is way more viable than military grade hardware gone through many iterations over decades to produce one of the most durable recording devices known to man. If we can't locate a black box with a freakin' transponder signal blasting out of it, what makes you think we're going to be able to locate your little LED light orange styrofoam ball?
The key is that nobody on board can stop the aircraft's position from being reported.
Other than by tripping the circuit breaker.
You do NOT want to have an electrical device on an aircraft that does not have a way of being unpowered when something shorts out and draws lots of current.
But yes, basically, all this talk about floating USB sticks being ejected from a crashing airplane is just nonsense. If you can't find the large bits of debris from the airplane itself, you aren't going to find small stuff. And if the airplane is on fire before ejecting the USB sticks, they can burn.
Continuous satellite data feeds on any aircraft over X pounds or Y passengers. It's not that expensive these days.
Airbus is on board with equipping them, Boeing less so. Boeing's concern centers around accidental deployment - they estimate that there will be 6 or 7 deployments per year.
An understandable concern, especially since accidental deployment may well happen on a runway, where FOD is a real risk to other aircraft, as testified by the fate of flight AF4590.
are both the device and the release mechanism flight ready? If not, my company (which I will form if you pay me up front) can push your design through certification for a nominal fee. Of course you will be blowing your $100 budget by a factor 10x or so.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Seriously... the planes are offering wifi... the planes should be constantly streaming their blackbox data (or a reasonable subset of it). If nothing else, the exact GPS location and altitude could be updated easily, redundantly, and perhaps even some of it over existing radio frequencies.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
oh well, not THAT big of a deal
Unless it is ejected onto your house from 10,000 ft...
Weren't there facebook users on the flight Mark Zuckerberg should know where they are..
The number of planes in the air at a given time would require that any such log be a summary only, but it could contain enough data to give investigators an immediate reading on what brought a plane down, plus GPS coordinates that would make it easier to locate the wreckage and the black boxes. It would also give us early warning of flights which have been taken over in any way by terrorists or which are off course. That shouldn't take a month to figure out.
Reader who knows nothing about a thing proposes a contrived and oversimplified way to "improve" said thing, which didn't need improving in the first place.
Reader then questions why he's not the president of the universe with all his great ideas.
Dude... I feel you. I too was once 13 years old. It gets better.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I misread the title, "Why Are We Spending Billions and Tons of Fossil Fuel On Search of Lost Planets?
couldn't agree more.
Not all airlines are willing to pay for an always-on satellite connection.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
After 9/11, US intelligence agencies, led by the NSA, embarked on a massive world-wide surveillance program, monitoring voice, text, email, web, IM, and even video game chat, for signs of terrorist plots. How many billions of dollars did this cost? It seems like they had a blank check.
Given that 9/11 involved smashing commercial jets into buildings, wouldn't you expect that JOB FUCKING ONE on their list of things to monitor would have been the location and status of commercial jets that could be used to attack American targets. And given that the US has military, diplomatic, and commercial interests around the globe, that pretty much means worldwide. It just seems to me THAT would have been top priority, and failure would not have been an option. Monitoring WHERE THE FUCKING KILLER JETS ARE would be top of the list, ahead of thing like monitoring text messages between two 12-year-olds in France or whatever other sleazy shit the NSA/CIA get up to.
So I think that people already know damn well where these planes are. They just don't want us to know that they have the ability know, because that's how intelligence agencies think.
1. Closure for humanitarian reasons. People want to know what happened to loved ones, there might be remains that can be properly interred, things like that.
2. Finding out what happened. What if there was a sequence of events that happened on that flight to cause the crash that could be easily repeatable on every other plane of that model? There are about 10,000 late-model 737's in service, at about $90 million each. If there's a problem, that's a lot of hardware at risk.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Seems to me, even if you get all the flight data, you'd still want whatever physical evidence you could get.
Flight recorder shows this. What caused that? It would really be handy to have as much of the tail section as we could find to figure it out.
Float Free emergency locating beacons are old news, even with data storage.
However, the aviation industry is always strapped for cash, and IATA and FAA not far behind, are reluctant to authorize any new implementations in this field.
The technological challenge is modest, the cost is modest or low, the technology very mature, but the the bureaucratic resistance is enormous to a Float Free emergency locating beacon with flight recording data, or anything that will cost five hundred bucks.
A few of these around the plane will survive, just like luggage and seat-cushions. Until the airlines pick ups the tab for locating the flight data recorders they will not respond rationally to this.
5 minutes x 600 miles/hour = a search radius of 50 miles. Which is the problem they currently have.
too much data for even a fraction of all the planes up in the air all at once.
All that stuff makes people feel as if they are "doing something" so they don't have to feel helpless.
Why not make black boxes (1) float, (2) determine their own position (via GPS, etc.), and (3) broadcast the latest position along with each "ping"? This would aid both in finding them and in recovery (no need for dives to the ocean floor unless something with the floating mechanism went wrong).
The question asked is valid for someone who is innocently ignorant. So I'm assuming that the submitter is a very young kid.
The reason the time, money and effort is spent is because the only way to prevent future accidents is to learn from the accidents of the past. Also it is human nature to want to know what happened to our love ones.
Also the reason why the USB idea is not feasible is because the USB drive and the "package release system" must first survive the accident to work. And there is very little to no chance that will be possible. Even if the drive manages to survive (highly unlikely), there are too many factors that will have to be overcomes for the release system to work ... including figuring out how to prevent the accumulation of debris onto the device, preventing the launch even if every survived unsealed. Just take a look at how much damage a "back box" receives during an accident. And even though it is ridiculously tough, it doesn't always survive a crash.
Or make a water soluble structural element (that floats) to another copy... Telemetry, voice in cabin etc... or... better yet.. stream the telemetry voice etc to my google+ account? We are supposed to look forward. The licensing/cost Bullsh*t is only for profiteering. Payback is on the first occurrence. then we dont have to dig up the plane and will know for the 5 PM news - same day. How many folks would pay for that?? Financial restrictions are idiotic constructs, in this case.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
+1
True.
Don't use fossil fuels.
Use your feet.
A working strategy since millions of Years (not only on Humans)
aaaaaaa
You put one under both wings. Bonus: redundancy in case it crashes on its side.
At the bottom of the
And a 3rd one that auto ejects if the airplain goes bellow 5000?ft without connection to a airstrip.
Actually. I think the submitters idea is not bad at all.
As long as we have each unit light and not to big each plane can have multiple blackbox units that can be dispatched. And if none of those are found or work we can go for the original.
So USB memory in raid 10.
Battery to be able to transmit etc..
GSM unit to be able to connect to mobile carriers and send a sms, and if plenty of battery left upload itself to server. (if one of the units reach land and is able to connect, no reason for all that fosill stuff), or if we add something so the units glide fly it can try to connect during accention.
Of corce all units should have sun panels that try to reload the battery to make radio bursts evey 7th day or so.
Looking at my daughters tablet I figure this should not be to hard to accomplish with the size of a fotball and around 1-2kg.
To get the thing bigger it could contain Multilayer "Ballon cover". Where each layer are independently inflating during accention (I guess the air rushing by should be able to at least partly use during downfall).
So I can imagine at least 3types
1. Parachute, close to where the air-plain got down can be hard to find due to it's small size
2. Glider. Will be found far away from the plains rute but will hopefully be able to transmit using GSM. (if it reaches rural areas it will be VERY easy to find.
3. "BigBall" the autoinflating thing. Basically it should inflate into a 2-3m orange ball (depending on how many layers/sections breaks. Still enought for satellites/airplanes to se.
Meanwhile some devices inside the plain that if geting in contact with water inflating ballons congaing registered RFID tags would be a easy solution working some times.
They have no real use anyway. Private personal transports? Give people longer vacations instead and they can go by boat. Transport of goods? Move the production closer. The main reason for air transports are laziness and lack of planning. (Keep a few ambulance planes and helis for emergency "things"... No, not emergency caviar!)
What's the matter KGill, forget to sign in?
I am Audience.
Do you suppose there are more airplanes than there are tractors? Every tractor, combine and piece of construction equipment made by the two largest producers is already doing this, since 2005.
They don't seem to get lost, either.
The first question to answer before answering a question containing the word "we" is: Who is "we"?
Some questions go away when you get the answer. There is no "we". No questions left.
Others become trivially easy to answer, or impossibly difficult to answer. No answerable questions left unanswered.
This time around: ask the people who decided to search.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
How did you all get so damn smart anyway ? Or it could it be that the vast majority of you are actually full of shit ?
That's way too obvious and has already been put together by a 17 year old.
You honestly think that there are more tractors than planes? Are you honestly this ignorant?
Even a 5 year old child knows that the answer is yes. There are more planes in on state that there are tractors in the world.
All the ones with onboard internet access (basically any intercontinental flight) already have continuous satellite comm.
You do NOT want to have an electrical device on an aircraft that does not have a way of being unpowered when something shorts out and draws lots of current
A GPS transponder can run for weeks on a single AAA battery. That's milliamps.
But yes, basically, all this talk about floating USB sticks being ejected from a crashing airplane is just nonsense. If you can't find the large bits of debris from the airplane itself, you aren't going to find small stuff.
The other bits aren't transmitting GPS coordinates, idiot.
Boy, did you live up to your user name this time.
Human beings have problems with a proper sense of scale.
Most people simply never spend any time out in nature and particularly in the vast expanses of nature. Their views of the planet come largely from TV screens and computer displays. This leads to all sorts of misconceptions. When an aircraft goes missing, people start asking why it's so hard to find. The answer is very simple:
The Earth is very large, and we humans and our biggest machines are very tiny.
Egypt Air is apparently over 10K feet down, and the Med is a vary large body of water. The terrain on the sea floor has the equivalent of mountain ranges and finding the wreckage of something as tiny as an airliner on the side of a mountain under 2 miles of water where sunlight never reaches is hard. It's just that simple. People who never go to sea have no idea of how large the world actually is and how difficult it is to find things in that environment.
Why should the airlines pay? Look at how many billions the governments have already spent looking for planes. What if the satellite connections are subsidized by governments instead?
Yep, I have one of those black boxes. It's called a mobile phone. They make them in "International" models too, that have satellite connections. In my case, it serves to tell my SO that I'm on my way home, and she can watch, so she doesn't feel the need to ask if I'm OK, unless I end up staying stuck in one spot for an unusual amount of time. Helps her find me, when I have flat tires and stuff.
Anyway, this technology makes good sense, but it costs money, and those few dollars have to be paid by the most tight-assed airline execs imaginable, and they aren't going to pay it.
Now, if you suddenly started passing international laws saying airlines had to compensate next-of-kin for passengers to the tune of $100,000 per person if they were "lost" instead of "killed", well, I reckon they could have them installed in every aircraft inside of 24 hours.
But, that's not how governments work.
1. Aircraft loss is a rare event - recovery of the black boxes and debris provides material to help reconstruct the event. 2. Recovery provides comfort and closure to the families of the deceased. 3. The large, coordinated multination search and recovery process sends a strong message to terrorists that we respond sanely to a disaster. We'll only send in the drones or special forces once we've accumulated evidence.
That's what the plane did till it did not work anymore.
Just "wow!".
In terms of a USB stick, honestly I'm guessing your age is under 18 or you majored in a non-STEM major or you graduated from a less-than-stellar high school. The forces involved in a plane exploding, colliding or crashing would pretty badly reduce the odds of a plastic USB stick even surviving. Being small makes it ever worse in terms of ever finding it.
Citation required. There are not that many planes in the world compared to tractors.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
What? About 20000-30000 larger aircraft have been built (737/A320 or larger). There are far more smaller planes but not as many as people think. Let just high ball it at 50000 aircraft flying. Each needs a 3 level GPS "ping" recorded every second (more than enough but we are highballing). Lets further assume that they fly 24/. For each axes we use a 8 byte (64) number. so 24bytes per second per aircraft, as in slower than a 9600b baud rate modem. Clearly this is a REALLY small amount. For all the aircraft of all the world we are talking about a total bandwidth of 1.2Mbyte (1.2e6 bytes). Or just 100G a day or less than 40T a year. That is nothing. And that is for ALL of the planes. With much higher precision than needed with much higher temporal sampling than needed.
So no not even close to too much data.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Which part of
was unclear?
Therefore any disgruntled customer would also be able to hit the button. You might not have seen it, but people hit fire alarm buttons all the time in shops, stadia, etc causing considerable trouble and costs.
Also, during detected flight emergencies, cabin crew do actually have things to do. Getting customers to SHUT THE FUCK UP COMPLAINING ABOUT YOUR MEAL, SIT DOWN AND FASTEN YOUR FUCKING SEATBELT, "M'am" ; Yes, other M'am I already showed you seven fucking times how to fasten the baby seat belt and you didn't fucking listen once did you and now the shit has hit the fan you want me to show you an 8th fucking time you retard your baby deserves to die "Here M'am, like this and this" , sit down you drunken bum-groping perv, "You really need to go to your seat now, Sir", "No sir, I don't know the nature of the emergency but the Captain will keep us informed as necessary ...
If you live near an airport and have tiime, volunteer to be a crash-test dummy for flight-crew training one day - it'll give you a different opinion or what they're actually there for. Or do an industrial flying school including evacuation drills in flame, smoke, into water, after inversion into water ... very educational! It'll put you off flying unless someone is paying you to take the risks.
No, not a big deal - like any other EPIRB that goes into the water. The signals will be picked up in a matter of minutes and rescue assets launched ; air traffic control will be calling all aircraft in the region for a position and status check ; coast guard and naval assets of multiple nations will be deployed to the area and a whole fucking shitload of resources will be deployed ... because the default response to detecting an emergency signal is to get everyone moving towards the indicted emergency in overwhelming force, not to sit around with thumbs firmly inserted into rectums, saying "oh, it's probably just a false alarm, or some stupid twat 'crying wolf'."
Have you ever noticed the opprobium that gets heaped on people who accidentally fire off an EPIRB (say, if they're carrying out maintenance on a boat)? Shit and shame is heaped on their head by the ton, from a great height. And that's for accidental discharge. Malicious discharge is in many countries a criminal offence.
Sorry, but have you ever had anything to do with Search and Rescue? Anything at ll, including being the lost victim?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Having taken dozens of intercontinental flights, I can't recall one that had internet service. Not that I'd have looked for one in any case.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
To mis-quote Shakespeare, "We fat ourselves for lawyers."
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Are you the sort of person who would put such an object at the front end of the aircraft? You do realise that the fat-cats up at the front in First and Business class are actually disposable padding to protect the "black boxes" from excessive impact forces. The black boxes are housed in the tail-cone of the aircraft, pretty much as far back as possible.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That sounds very credible. There are about that many accidental deployments of the maritime equivalents in the UK annually. They're normally accidental (when the deployer gets a really serious telling off), but malicious cases have been known.
Up-thread someone suggested putting Big Red Switches where the cabin crew can get at them. That would increase the number of accidental deployments a lot, and when people start to find out about it, malicious deployments will become an issue.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What - you mean in the same way that has been SOP for over 30 years?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
> Plnaes get moved around from route to route routinely (sorry)
You don't move a plane or crew certified for 75 minutes between airports (ETOPS-75) to a route with 180 minutes between airports (ETOPS-180). The systems in place do a pretty damn good job of preventing that.
This is where someone brings up the August, 2015 LA-Honolulu flight by American Airlines. Yes, once a plane was wrongly assigned. The Airbus was a model that was certified for the flight, but without the extra oxygen and fire extinguishers provided by the ETOPS-180 option package. It it made national news. Once, a plane flew a route it wasn't supposed to and it was national news because that occurs so rarely. American Airlines immediately reported it to the FAA as required.
(It didn't crash or anything, just flew a route that required more fire extinguishers becuase there are no diversion airports between LA and Honolulu).
This cannot be a serious post! How did this article pass an editor, or even to /.??? Firstly, there are lots of truly qualified engineers working on more effective new solutions. i.e. realtime telemetry to satellites, for one. Request: Let all potentially good ideas pass real scrutiny among truly qualified engineers/scientists before taking up valuable readers' time.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Because airports famously only ever have one plane in motion at a time.
A GPS transponder can run for weeks on a single AAA battery. That's milliamps.
GPS is not a "transponder" system. It's a receiver. The fact that a GPS receiver can run for weeks on a single battery is irrelevant when you talk about having a transmitter that is sending position data to a satellite. Transmitters use a bit more power. You want them on the system power bus so you don't get halfway over the ocean and find out your AAA battery in the "GPS transponder" has died so you have no protection.
The other bits aren't transmitting GPS coordinates, idiot.
A USB stick isn't transmitting GPS coordinates, either, moron. There, did adding that gratuitous insult add to the conversation?
We're talking about an existing system that is already being used to send engine and performance data back to the manufacturer being expanded into a general tracking system. What's so rocket-science about that?
Hmm. 180 minutes between (diversion) airports ... I don't think I get above that even in mid-Sahara. (A couple of years ago I had a diversion - lightning strike during the climb. Aborted to next capital along the coast for inspection then 8 hours in an un-air-conditioned departures hall waiting to re-board. Complete pain in the arse.). Certainly not above Asia - too many capital cities in all the 'Stans, each one wanting a full-service international airport and penis-extension (even if they don't actually have the traffic to justify it). When I worked in Canada, I'm not sure that would even apply on the stretch between Keflavik and Gander. Depends on the exact great circle taken. Does it apply anywhere apart from mid-Pacific? Because if that's the case I'm far more likely to go to anywhere in the Pacific by flying overland (e.g. Paris-Delhi-Singapore-Sydney-New Zealand). I'm pretty sure that Perth WA can take 747s and A380s, otherwise Quantas would have been particularly insane to have brought A380s, and they had one of the first A380 incidents when the plane went into service.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So, in your design, these things can be ejected WITHOUT alarms screaming in the ears of cockpit crew and cabin crew chief. What is the current minimum spacing allowed to avoid planes flying into the turbulence of the preceding plane. I think it used to be 3 minutes, but it's been raised to 5 minutes in the last decade or so. Something to do with a plane being brought down by flying into wake turbulence. Or are you going to dispense with that pointless restriction, because after all, no planes have ever been brought down by wake turbulence. Apart from the ones that have.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"