This black box is dropped about 2 miles deep in the ocean. They are not likely to find it.
But how would you like it if every second of your job was being recorded and sent back to authorities. I doubt the pilots will go for that.
That’s radar, not GPS. The crash was out of radar range. (And if you track flights, there are many that disappear once they leave US airspace.)
Tough shit for the pilots; I’ve worked retail jobs where I was being recorded and sent back to “the authorities” (ie loss prevention). Black boxs already record everything that goes on in the cockpit (although I’m not sure if they have video).
Here you go, planes are tracked by radar, not GPS. Why else would it be so hard to locate a missing airplane? Radar works about 200 miles out over the ocean. Works pretty good over land but once they are over the sea the tracking is poor.
I can understand not finding the ones that hit the twin towers, because of the combination of fire and an entire building coming down on it, but I would have thought that the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was more like your “typical” crash - why wouldn’t they have been able to find that one?
There’s a decent chance it’s near or attached to some sizable bit of the plane, which could possibly show up in a sonar scan. In view of the fact that it’s unlikely we’ll learn what caused this crash without recovering the data, it’s clearly worth some serious time, effort and expense to look.
They did find those two recorders for United 93; that’s how we know how some of the passengers took action and probably prevented another important target from being hit.
And just to be clear (because I didn’t know this either), the flight recorders for AA 11 and United 175, the two planes that hit the twin towers were never found. The flight recorders for AA 77, which hit the Pentagon, were found, although the Cockpit Voice Recorder was too damaged by fire to be useful. The Flight Data Recorder, however, did provide useful information.
I don’t know where you got that. The black boxes were recovered from Flight 93.
Did anyone touch upon this simple answer… The pilot’s Union.
The pilot’s Union is totally opposed to any tracking of their pilots while in flight. As long as there is a strong pilot Union against such measures, you’ll never see a plane with constant data transfer.
You think the automatic text message the plane sent was an afterthough? They’re lucky that got that info. :dubious:
You’re not thinking like an aviation engineer. You tack the box on the outside of the plane like you would an antenna in an aerodynamic form. The parachute and flotation device would deploy if the box was ejected. It would be easier than adding a RAT.
Airliners dont just fall out of the sky, there is always a cause and effect. For the voting public, there has to be herculean efforts to recover the after affects of the crash, including the black box. Simply saying its too deep to recover, is not going to cut it.
Declan
It’s a possibility for future aircraft designs, but not for existing planes. You could never adequately modify every type, and I think Transport Canada at least would kill you if you tried to request that many STCs at once.
The catch becomes when to eject the box…under what conditions does it need to be ejected, how can it be guaranteed that it wouldn’t make a situation more serious (ok, that’s far fetched, but random winds and parachutes could send it right back towards the plane, right? You wouldn’t want a recoverable situation made worse by an engine taking in it’s own black box or having the box knock the rudder off).
As an investigator, you want every last second of data, so you aren’t getting past the loss of data issue by ejecting before the plane hits the ground. Also, what if the ejection mechanism fails somehow? Then you have a vulnerable black box more exposed to the elements/contact with the ground without the structure of the plane surrounding it. As planes are currently designed, I WAG that it’s intended that the plane takes the damage in order to protect the black boxes, right? These aren’t necessarily impossible obstacles to overcome, but they are certainly things you’d have to think about in the design.
I’m sure there are a bunch of designs out there for floating/deployable data recorders, and I think I read an article (I can’t remember from which paper at this point!) about the FAA looking at some floating ones, but they could be a back-up at best.
Current black boxes aren’t really as bad as this thread seems to indicate. They really don’t fail all that often. For a properly working recorder, the fact that it is at the bottom of the sea is entirely irrelevant - we can go down and get it, although at considerable cost and time. It is designed to survive those pressures, and saying things like “it’s lost under 2 miles of water” is a red herring, for a working box. A working box pings, though, so we can find it and go get it. Like looking around for that damn brick at the bottom of the pool before you dive down and get it; no big deal. The problem with this particular crash is that, for whatever reason, the box isn’t pinging or the mountains on the ocean floor are making it harder to hear (the fucking brick is the on the black lane markers), which is why we can’t find it. I’d bet that all the data is there, intact, and will be intact and recoverable years from now. We just can’t find the damn box.
Finding ways to make recorders similar to the current ones more fire resistant, more impact resistant and improve the pinging mechanism would be more economically feasible and acceptable in the short run in the eyes of the airlines/manufacturers/regulatory agencies, at least in the current market. Just look at the resistance to switching from 30 minute CVRs to 2 hour ones!
Who knows where we’ll be in 20 years, though?
But as I recall they have an erase button in case the pilots don’t like the idea of whatever they did going on record.
I think that this should be looked at as a cost-benefit problem. Before deciding to impose expensive new measures the benefits and copsts would have to be shown.
Benefits:
How many more boxes would be recovered if the design was changed compared to the number recovered now?
What is the value of the information in the extra boxes recovered? (How many lives can be saved in the future by getting the information from one more box?)
Costs:
How much would costs increase?
For the ejectable black box solution one would have to add the loss of information about what happened to the plane after the box was ejected.
For the streaming of data solution I guess the risk of critical data getting scrambled or lost would have to be included in the calculation.
They can only be erased on the ground with the park brake on, i.e., once the flight has finished and the chance for accident is nil.
I don’t think that is true at all. The whole safety record of today’s airlines is built on lessons learned from prior mistakes. Without “black boxes” we’d still be flying in the '50s and the skies were a hell of a lot more dangerous then. We use them 100% to find out what went wrong, the fact that non-aviation people expect to also know what went wrong is largely irrelevant.
I think the reasons we still use them have been well covered. The big ones are probably the difficulty in implementing major changes in airline technology plus, more importantly, the fact that cruise accidents are exceedingly rare and not being able to find the recorders is even more rare. Don’t forget that these recorders haven’t not been found yet, it’s only been a few days.
Not really. I build 737’s for a living, there is very little wasted space in these airplanes. The flight recorder on 737’s is located between the rear doors above the ceiling, there is about a foot of vertical space there. There is also a bunch of wiring, air ducts and support structure up there.
Besides adding your simplistic small chute and shotgun shell, how do you plan to have the recorder leave the body envelope. This would require some kind of door. Add all the weight for the extra crap that goes along with another opening in the airplane fuselage, any advantage is lost.
Besides, the FAA and other organizations that use the info from the flight recorders want it running up until the final second or beyond of the crash. Ejecting the flight recorder before the crash would cause a loss of the most valuable information that these things record.
I was responding to this post from Huerta88:
I guess he was meaning 9/11 to refer only to the two planes that hit the twin towers, not the other two 9/11 flights.
Crashing planes almost never descend at 32 ft/sec[sup]2[/sup]. They’ve still got wings, even if all the engines go out.
And they certainly do want all the data up to impact. They don’t just want to know why the plane is no longer airworthy, they want to know what the pilots did to correct the problem and why that didn’t work, and if the training & procedures for a particular type of failure mode need to be modified.
There’s also the terrible whooshing noise you get from a plane made out of black boxes.
The ‘why don’t they make planes out of the same material as black boxes?’ inquiry was purely sarcasm. * :: d&r::* means ‘ducks and runs’. As in: makes funny comment we’ve heard way too often, and then ducks and runs as if we’re going to hit him for getting on our nerves with a tired question.
You’re right, I wouldn’t like it, and you’re right, the pilots won’t like it. Their unions have forcefully opposed public release of the tapes of past CVRs, on the somewhat-plausible grounds that its disrespectful and invasive, also on the unspoken grounds that about half the tapes end up showing the pilots chit chatting about the stewardesses’ dating habits instead of flying the plane. And my answer to that is: deal with it, my job doesn’t jeopardize 250 lives, and it’s not that hard to keep from gossipping about the flight attendants’ breasts.