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.

Comments

Numerous bits of ignorance.

[gurps_npc]

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.

sat phone

[sageFool]

If we are playing this game, then why not have all that data being sent through a sat phone link real time?

Re:It's called a black box

[Anonymous Coward]

I have serious doubts those USB drives will be capable of surviving the temperatures of a fire or the kinetic impact these kinds of crashes tend to experience. All the components in a blackbox are more hardened than your average walmart toys.

They don't design these devices for giggles. Everything you've thought about has been taken into consideration already by multiple people, possibly people with degrees of some sort.

Discuss solutions

[Okian Warrior]

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?

Good Idea

[kamakazi]

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.......

it's the people

[sdinfoserv]

We're not looking for planes - we're looking for people.

Re:Sure.

[jwhyche]

We spend that money looking for survivors. Believe it or not people do survive plane crashes. I find it hard to believe the original poster didn't think of this. I have to question his thinking on this.

"Oh another plane went down. There might be survivors but fuck'em. We don't need to be wasting fuel looking for them."

Anther reason is we want to know why the plane crashed. Was it pilot error, terrorism, or some thing wrong with the design of the plane. If there is a flaw in the plane, we need to know if this affects the whole fleet. Not just that one.