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

Sure.

[DougOtto]

Then we can spend all that fuel looking for a piece of floating garbage. How in the hell did this get green-lighted?

Re:Sure.

[XxtraLarGe]

Then we can spend all that fuel looking for a piece of floating garbage.

But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport? I figure if we're going to ask hypothetical questions, why not really go off the deep end?

Re:Sure.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

But what if the USB flash drives were somehow attached to a turtle that was trained to swim back to the nearest airport?

And what if we also outfitted the turtle with a strobe light, and then hired Aquaman to search for the turtles?

BRB, on my way to the patent office!

Re:Sure.

[LunaticTippy]

You're not thinking big enough. Why not put that turtle on top of an even larger turtle? And so on and so on until there are enough turtles to hold up the plane and it doesn't crash in the first place!

Re:Sure.

[Dins]

That's it! We mount small planes under the planes, complete with their own black boxes. It's planes all the way down!

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.

Re:Sure.

[barakn]

No, you won't reduce the weight. The flapping wings will decrease the pressure above them and increase the pressure below them. These pressure differences, when integrated over the surface area of the enclosed air space and averaged over the entire time the pigeon is flying, will exactly equal the weight of the pigeon.

It's called a black box

[HumanWiki]

"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.

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.

Re:It's called a black box

[FlyHelicopters]

Such a floating USB flash drive would cost maximum a hundred USD even if equipped with a tiny LED lamp

^ Says the person who doesn't know anything about what it costs to install equipment to an airliner...

It would probably add $50,000 to the price of each airplane, for something so rarely used...

Re:It's called a black box

[AmiMoJo]

USB drives wouldn't survive anyway. Heat from a fire would kill them. Sudden deceleration would rip the components off the circuit board. Electrical faults would fry them. The USB connector itself is not waterproof anyway. Splash proof perhaps, but not "submersible to 5000m for months at a time". The connectors they use on black boxes are military grade for this reason, and rather expensive.

Styrofoam will disintegrate instantly on impact, and melt in heat.

Black boxes are already as optimized as they can be for cost and recoverability.

Re:It's called a black box

[Junior J. Junior III]

Why don't they build the ENTIRE PLANE out of USB drives?

Re:It's called a black box

[LynnwoodRooster]

IIRC (I worked at Sundstrand Data Control back in the 90s, they were, at that time, the biggest supplier of data recorders for aircraft) there are typically 2 - one cockpit voice recorder, and one flight data recorder. SOMETIMES there were redundant data recorders. But rarely. Of course, they were wickedly hardened, essentially flame-and-heatproof, and the recording media at the time (metal foil or magnetic tape) was impervious to any kind of damage short of pulling it all out and running it through a shredder. You could still get data off of it even if it was cut in two.

Re:It's called a black box

[SvnLyrBrto]

You clearly have no idea just how expensive electronics certified for aviation use are. You can't just take the $200 Garmin you can buy on amazon and use it in an aircraft. The cheapest GPS unit I've been able to find (Admittedly in just 5-10 minutes of searching.) thats suitable for this use case 's the Trig TN70, which retails for $3119. So we've already blown your estimate by a factor of 3. And that's just for the receiver/processor module. It doesn't include the antenna, wiring, power, mounting, and so on; to say nothing of the rest of your equipment list.

Re:It's called a black box

[dfm3]

No. Then they'd have to turn around 3 times before successfully landing on the runway, and they'd always be getting lost...

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.

Re:Numerous bits of ignorance.

[slew]

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.

What is the reason existing Iridium satellites, or geostationary communication satellites can't be used to provide a near continuous transmission of at least basic data (position, speed, etc.) at a modest update rate? I'd guess even if few kbs rate would be plenty.

Commercial aircraft *already* do broadcast pretty much continuously using ACARS...

The problem is twofold
1. Planes fly very high and go fast and they have wings which generate aerodynamic lift which result in a huge search area when something goes wrong and they stop sending these pings...
2. The ACARS system is very old and currently doesn't transmit GPS information and the location determined by a combination of radar and triangulation. The newer ADS-B system will remedy this as it adds tracking information, but is currently only being deployed now and does not exist in older aircraft.

In fact ADS-B is *already* planned to link with iridium satellites (with newer satellites to be launched in the next few years), but up-linking with geosync satelllite isn't very practical (because they are very far away, and they don't launch new ones very often)...

But of course /.-readers have the whole world figured out already, so maybe we can lobby scrap the ADS-B system and equip all new aircraft with USB sticks instead...

Re:Numerous bits of ignorance.

[Strider-]

Both Iridium and Orbcomm are truly global systems. Iridium satellites are in 86.9 degree orbits, and with 66 of them in active service, they provide pole to pole coverage. In fact, some of the early phones had a firmware bug that would cause them to get all confused in polar regions because they had so many satellites to choose from, and Iridium only allows hand-off between satellites going in the same general direction. Not a problem in most of the world, but at the poles, yes.

The only place where there may be issues with Iridium is over China, but that's due to licensing and legal restrictions placed by the government there, not due to any technical reason.

What you're probably thinking about is Globalstar, which is not global in reach. With Globalstar, your handset/earth station must be within single-hop distance to one of their earth-based gateways (Ie the satellite must be able to see you and a gateway at the same time). This means there is a large coverage gap in the mid pacific ocean.

Because Iridium uses inter-satellite links, all civilian traffic downlinks through their gateway in Tempe Arizona, and DoD downlinks through an earth station in Hawaii. If you make an Iridium to Iridium call, there is a good chance that it will get routed directly through the satellite constellation and never go through Tempe (or Hawaii).

Re:Numerous bits of ignorance.

[tnyquist83]

Iridium has 66 sats in low polar orbits, giving them 100% coverage of the Earth's surface, Inmarsat used geostationary orbits and has coverage of most of the Earth within ~80 degrees of the equator. In the MH370 case, the last communications received were from the Inmarsat terminal on the plane. The problem is that the signals didn't have location data, and the services that would provide locations were disabled.

As most countries migrate to ADS-B, there will be more planes regularly transmitting their current location. There is also an ongoing effort to add ADS-B reception to the Iridium network so they don't have to rely on ground stations.

The only real changes that are needed now is to make sure transponders can't be turned off in flight.

Re:Numerous bits of ignorance.

[gurps_npc]

I was in fact referencing Globalstar and had assumed it was the same for the other systems.

Thank you for educating me.

Re:Numerous bits of ignorance.

[MarkRose]

The new Iridium NEXT satellites should be in place by the end of 2017. Nav Canada is going to use the ADS-B service to monitor northern air space starting in 2018.

With four Iridum satellites in range, it should be possible to do MLAT positioning even with the old ADS-B.

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:sat phone

[bugs2squash]

Last time I flew through lots of clouds, why not just store it in one of those ?

When all of the systems fail...

[Overzeetop]

...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.

Better idea - buddy system

[SuperKendall]

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.

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?

Re:Discuss solutions

[bluefoxlucid]

We're known for +5 Insightful that agrees with the majority political opinion of Slashdot as filtered by who has mod points at the time, often to the hilarious effect that the highly-rated comments are stupid and defective. I'm pretty sure *many* of the people who are nodding and agreeing with me on economics comments are just happy I touched their feel-good liberal or feel-good conservative standpoint in some aspect, so I get modded up for saying "minimum wage is bad" or "we need a better welfare system" with big words, instead of for actually being right.

"Hey, I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but floating USB drives sound like a great idea because I'm a self-proclaimed nerd surrounded by old ISA cards" is a political opinion, too.

Re:Discuss solutions

[orasio]

I think the discussion in this post is great, and this is why I come back to Slashdot.

The problem itself is nothing.
From and engineering standpoint, locating a plane is no big deal. We all know that if we want to find a fallen plane, the best approach is to track it all the time. It's expensive, takes time, but also has a lot of advantages for regulating traffic.

The fact that this is such an obvious idea and is not being done yet, explains how hard it is to make changes to this kind of thing. It's not for lack of ideas. As always, it's execution that counts.

Re:Discuss solutions

[epine]

I'm pretty sure *many* of the people who are nodding and agreeing with me on economics comments are just happy I touched their feel-good liberal or feel-good conservative standpoint in some aspect, so I get modded up for saying "minimum wage is bad" or "we need a better welfare system" with big words, instead of for actually being right.

Not that the same thing ever happens in scholastic peer review, or a movie studio, or presidential candidate selection.

The vagaries of social approval are more transparent in certain venues, such as Slashdot, making them A) easier targets to lampoon, and B) old news that the smart money already adequately renormalizes.

The reality of all this lies so far from conception (in all human spheres), as to call into question that moderation functions—even asymptotically, in the ideal—as a winnowing screen of meritocracy.

Our attentional filters seem, at best, to be universally biased toward recognition and archetype, with but a side of merit (on a good day). Turns out humans are generally unprepared to imbibe merit undiluted.

It always shocks me to see an otherwise brilliant person discuss the outcome of a debate within the psychological framework of "how could my adversary not denounce his own position right then and there under the onslaught of my imposing facts?" There's an element of this in both Dawkins and Sam Harris. Hitch was more complex in his views (perforce more realistic), while Dennett gets himself so embroiled in the subterfuge of subtlety I'm not sure he would notice if this were to actually happen on stage.

Dawkins: Sadly, an Honest Creationist

Faced with all the evidence in the world that this view does not accord with the human condition, they both persist, at least, in wishing it were otherwise.

Good question with stupid solution

[waldozer]

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?

Re:Good question with stupid solution

[AmiMoJo]

Aircraft do transmit data to satellites periodically. It's expensive though. Lots of aircraft, satellites with expensive receivers covering the whole world, on reserved bands... So it's only used for essential engine monitoring and aircraft health data. Minimized to the minimum number of bits possible.

I don't know if it would be cost effective to include GPS coordinates in the data. It might not help the search that much... If the aircraft electronics fail or it breaks up in mid air, it can travel quite a long way as it falls 11,000m to the ground. Also, these transmissions are spaced very far apart to keep costs down, like once every few hours if there are no serious faults to report. So if it fails suddenly, the last data might be from hours before.

Mesh network is interesting but the problem is what kind of radio you would use. To get the range you would need very long wavelengths, which means very long antennas. Long antennas mean lots of drag. If you look at some older aircraft they have a wire going form the fuselage to the tip of the tail which is just such an antenna, but modern ones don't because of the drag and resulting cost. Oh, and there are some issues with allocating a band world wide for this too.

Why not ...

[whoever57]

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).

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.......

Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floating..

[raymorris]

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.

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[The-Ixian]

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.

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[twotacocombo]

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?

[tekrat]

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.

Re:If mere citizens got to approve...

[ScentCone]

If mere citizens got to approve all the stupid stuff governments do, there wouldn't be much government left.

No, the other way around. When mere citizens directly, through mob-style-democracy, vote for programs, spending, and services ... they generally set up a bunch of bankrupting entitlements and impossible budget friction that it takes decades to clean up after. See: California.

it's the people

[sdinfoserv]

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

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[Anonymous Coward]

How about non-stop streaming the info?

Depends on if Sullenberger is flying

[raymorris]

> 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.

Re:Depends on if Sullenberger is flying

[MBGMorden]

Not that it can't be done, it's just non-trivial.

I think you're going to find that that's always the case when someone thinks they can solve any serious real world problem with an afterthought in a forum comment box.

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[tlhIngan]

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).

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.

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[hey!]

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.

Re:Who the hell is Max_W?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the questions was stupid, yes. The entire time I read it I was very "Wha?" about it but it did spawn some good and informative postings. That's more than I can say about all the political and entertainment slop that gets posted here. Even many of the computing and science related posts are lacking in truly informative postings anymore. It was a nice change of pace.

Think they haven't been trying to solve this?

[tipo159]

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.

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[Joce640k]

If only the Boeing engineers were as smart as you guys....and knew as much about air pressure and stuff like that.

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[Obfuscant]

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.

Re:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[Incadenza]

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.