The water at the Deepwater Horizon location was roughly 5,000 ft deep. Relevant snip from wiki on Deepwater Horizon:
In February 2010, Deepwater Horizon commenced drilling an exploratory well at the Macondo Prospect Mississippi Canyon about 41 miles (66 km) off the southeast coast of Louisiana, at a water depth of approximately 5,000 feet (1,500 m).
The hole they bored into the earth underneath that water was deeper, although I could not readily find a cite for how deep the hole was.
The 35,000 feet mentioned in various articles refers to the maximum drilling depth capability of the rig.
All the stuff that was forensically relevant was on the surface of the seabed. Either installed there before the explosion (e.g. blowout preventer), or sank there after the explosion (the rest of the rig and drill string).
In any case, it wasn’t hard to find at least the big pieces.
It is always best to have a backup. It can’t hurt (especially in the super safety-oriented airline industry). Once in a while we have a mysterious crash (such as the Malaysia Airlines MH370 disappearance) where radar tracking was insufficient to solve the mystery. In fact, afterward people demanded better black box technology, suggesting black boxes will become more important in the future!
Boeing’s lack of attention to safety resulted in substantial financial losses. I suspect they lost more than the value of the lost passengers and crew, if each life is worth $10 million.
I assume you’re referring to the crashes of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX aircraft. Real-time telemetry would not have saved any of those passengers or prevented any of Boeing’s subsequent financial losses. The data collected from the FDR/CVR units on those planes absolutely will save future lives; however, real-time telemetry on those flights would not have saved any additional lives above and beyond that, and so would have had zero value here.
According to Wikipedia, there have been 12 aviation incidents in the past two decades in which flight recorders were either not found or not usable. Of those twelve, three were associated with the 9/11 attacks; there doesn’t seem to be much mystery about what happened on board those flights, so it seems unlikely that telemetric data from those flights would have saved additional future lives beyond the measures we’ve already taken. A fourth incident involved a stolen aircraft that was never recovered; no life-saving lessons to be learned from that flight, although I suppose telemetry might have aided in finding the stolen plane.
That leaves just eight loss-of-life incidents in 20 years with no black-box data. It’s not known whether info from those flights would have resulted in life-saving changes to future aviation practices. To estimate that, you’d need to look at the history of plane crashes over the past few decades to see, among other things, what percentage yielded black-box data that did result in life-saving changes to regs, and what percentage had no recoverable black-box data.
I was referring to the value of a human life more than the black box. If Boeing valued a human life at $10 million they still should have only sold airplanes with at least two sensors. They lost a lot of money once the scandal broke. (Airlines that bought these, without the “optional” extra sensors, are also to blame.)
From my link, the FDR/CVR units on the planes that hit the WTC towers were never found. For the plane that hit the pentagon, the FDR/CVR units were recovered, but the CVR was damaged beyond utility.
That leaves United 93 as the only flight with usable CVR data. Most of the detailed info about events on the 9/11 planes comes from phone calls made by passengers and cabin crew, using cell phones and seatback telephones (on AA Flight 11, the first one to crash, the cabin crew were able to discreetly reach AA operations center and explain what was happening; also, one of the highjackers in the cockpit accidentally made an announcement to ATC instead of the cabin PA system).
I’m speculating at this point, but it seems highly likely that even without any data or audio from the planes, we would have figured out that all four aircraft were hijacked and deliberately crashed, and would still have mandated better cockpit security on commercial aircraft in the future. This would mean the value of the future lives saved by real-time telemetry on those planes would probably be zero.
You misunderstood my intent. The idea of up-linking real-time data to a satellite doesn’t seem to justify the cost/benefit–no where did I imply that safety should be tossed aside because it “just doesn’t happen anymore” (at least in the US).
This isn’t just some rhetorical response, BTW, I lost a brother in a Class A mishap involving a Coast Guard aircraft. I’ve also loss a co-worker who died in a GA crash. The former was caused by shitty maintenance by another service branch in the former and the latter was pilot error. So, yeah, I’m little prickly about aircraft safety.
Every dollar we spend chasing silly things in the name of “safety!!1!” is a dollar diverted from pursuing things that actually improve actual safety. There is always room for legitimate debate on where the closest snake or low-hanging fruit is.
Datalinking everything all the time pretty obviously ain’t it.
As a network engineer you don’t trust wireless connections for important data of any sort because the reliability just isn’t nearly as good. There are also privacy and security issues that have to be addressed. Satellite bandwidth is expensive and uplink speeds are relatively slow particularly with the number of planes flying around, especially when each plane is a moving target. Plus airplane accidents generally happen during bad weather and bad weather blocks most Satellite uplinks. A flight recorder is recording tons of data every second and offloading that data in real time in the middle of the pacific ocean is not practical or even particularly desirable. Real time access doesn’t save the lives of anyone on the plane, it only is useful to the people on the next plane, and like an autopsy speed isn’t really an issue.
