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.

[Dins]

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

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

[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?

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).

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 ?

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 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?

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.

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:Never misplaced a 747 around the house. Floatin

[Anonymous Coward]

How about non-stop streaming the info?

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.