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It’s a huge tragedy, and my heart goes to the survivors of 228 passengers who left Rio, but never arrived to Paris.
The black boxes landed somewhere 3000 meters deep in the ocean and their batteries supporting emitting signals will die in 30 days.
The chances are very slim that the boxes from the crashed Air France plane will be found, and the world will never learn if this was a one time failure or some serious design issue of that particular aircraft model.
I wonder why air industry is still using such a bogus method as black boxes?
I would do it differently – in addition to recording in black boxes in planes, 100% of the pilots’ conversations should transmitted as an audio stream to a server located on the ground at the closest to the vehicle control center's. This way in case of the aircraft crash all the data about the accident would be available immediately. No need to spend millions trying to locate and get a hold of the black boxes. Huge cost savings...
Technically, implementing such a solution is not too difficult. A number of the aircrafts (at least in the USA) already offer the internet connection on board even to the passengers. Identifying a closest to the vehicle server of a particular network is also a no brainer. Streaming audio is a trivial software task too.
I'm sure, some airline must be doing this already.
The most difficult part is to bring all the world carriers to the same table, agree on the infrastructure, and develop the software and the new “black boxes”. A simple commodity computer like a netbook placed in a sturdy case can perform the duties of such transmitter. A central server would automatically aggregate the fragments of the received audio and deliver the complete file to the authorities of the airline the plane belongs to.
Why the world doesn’t do it yet? It’s the 21st century. Talking about rich Internet applications and cloud computing…
I’d be happy to get involved in such a project myself. Guys, let’s do it…Anyone?
You are right in concept. But the problem is that most Avionics are behind
the times. You need to be able to develop a system that will not interfere
with the operational systems. Your thoughts of tying things to ground
control are slightly misguided (pardon the pun).
Adrian,
Perhaps the biggest problem you'd face isn't technical. Pilot unions are
likely to vehemently oppose having all their cockpit conversations
recorded. I doubt they'd trust assurances of encryption and retrieval only
upon need.
Any is possible using computers. I too really interested in such project
and to work with Yakov.
However i am working in an IT Company and from India.
source Wikipedia: "Approximately 80 percent of all aviation accidents occur
shortly before, after, or during takeoff or landing, and are often
described as resulting from 'human error'; mid-flight disasters are rare
but not entirely unheard of."
Muthu,
@Alex B. Just one not recovered black box can cost thousands of lives in
the future.
The thing is black box is most useful for situations where connection to
airplane is lost, so pilots can not inform any where about what is going
wrong and also black box records technical events even pilots are not aware
of. So technicaly such a streaming would not add much to this situation
because prorbably the connection would be lost before the incident occurs.
However i still believe such an evolution will make things to be solved
faster and easier. I would also do my best voluntarily to such project..
