Flight Data Recorders, Decades Out of Date 266
Tisha_AH writes "For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant. Some of the advances of cloud computing, mesh radio networks, real-time position reporting and satellite communications are held back by a combination of aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions and the slow gears of government bureaucracy. Many recent aircraft loss incidents remain unexplained, with black boxes lost on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, buried under the wreckage of the World Trade Centers or with critical information suppressed by government secrecy or aircraft manufacturers. Many devices still rely upon tape recorders for voice and data that only record a very small sampling of aircraft dynamics, flight and engine systems or crew behaviors. Technologically simple solutions like battery backup, continual telemetry feeds by satellite and hundreds of I/O points, monitoring many systems should be within easy reach. Pilot unions have objected to the collection and sharing of detailed accident data, citing privacy concerns of the flight crew. Accidents may be due to human error, process problems or design flaws. Unless we can fully evaluate all factors involved in transportation accidents, it will be difficult to improve the safety record. Recommendations by the NTSB to the FAA have gone unheeded for many years. With all of the technological advancements that we work with in the IT field, what sort of best practices could be brought forward in transit safety?"
Re:tape isn't bad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's absolutely ridiculous (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, no. You're almost a century out of touch with reality. What you say was true in 1930s.
Today, when an airplane crashes, the human has failed. Pretty much always. Technical issues that lead to crashes are very, very rare. If you were to place monetary bets, a winning strategy is to bet for human failure.
Re:Conservative Tech (Score:2, Informative)
No. (although you answer completely beside the point, we're talking about the safety of buzzword external means of recording)
On modern airplanes, the RAT (ram air turbine) is an electrical generator not hydraulic). It supplies DC emergency electrical network and a few flight control power.
It's not at all academic. The RAT helped save many aircrafts from crash.
(pneumatic is the air intake at engine level that supplies part of air conditionning and pressurization systems)
Re:a bit for unions a bit for bureaucracy... (Score:4, Informative)
Regardless, it's the article's author who is jumping to conclusions here.
Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)
Sure... "lost" under the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Uh huh.
Re:Buzzwords (Score:2, Informative)
Bandwidth! (Score:3, Informative)
There are good technical reasons why FDR data doesn't make sense to upload raw data automatically.
The pure FDR data is sampled at a high data rate, which varies according to model of FDR. The most modern systems also collect hundreds of data points at a time. This is discussed in the article, though I'd challenge some of their bandwidth calculations... the sample rates they quote seem very low (for modern systems), though I don't have my books in front of me.
What DOES make sense (and again, the article does address this), is having computing capability in the FDR (or outside of it, as it wouldn't need to be crash-worthy) that filters the data and ID's in real-time out-of-normal events and reports them.
In fact, most airlines already use a system like this, but not for the purpose of crash monitoring, but to detect aircraft problems in flight and alert ground crew so they can they can be prepared to fix them before the pilots even know there was a problem.
The issue is that this uplink capability can't replace the on-board FDR recording capability. That black box must still be there, as during the crash sequence, there is a good chance your satcom/etc systems will fail before the final crash. So this can augment, but not replace.
They also discuss adding a capability to comb through the complete raw data (you can just download it on landing as another route). Yep, great idea, but already being done by many airlines.
See http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aviationservices/brochures/Airplane_Health_Management.pdf [boeing.com]
And in fact, the military is using the FDR data to check their pilot's proficiency as well as the aircraft performance:
See http://www.navair.navy.mil/PMA209/_Documents/MFOQA_101_20090224.ppt [navy.mil]
Re:tape isn't bad (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. My wife worked on the "black boxen" (really orange for visibility in a wreck). She was always complaining because the internal tape mechanisms were the exact same as an old 8-track from the 70's, and with the tape constantly running the ferrite wore off. The boxes were full of black crap, and sometimes the rollers were so old, the rubber went gummy and fscked up all the tape. Lot's of the recorders came in totally inoperative, and had been that way for a long time.
She was so glad when they finally started making, and using, solid state drives.
Re:It's absolutely ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't twist my words. I don't claim there are no non-human-factor caused crashes, I just claim that a vast majority is human factors, and mostly cockpit human factors at that.
AF447 is, to the best of my knowledge, a case of the pilots getting confused by a single point of failure in the air data instrumentation. If you look around, you will find posts by pilots who faced similar issues, had similar ACARS messages sent out, and they recovered without problems as long as they followed procedures. Surely it did fall apart in the sky, but it didn't "just" fall apart, at least there is no reason to think this way so far. To me, that's not unlike China Air 006 but with a different ending.
USAIR 1549, the famous Hudson water landing -- well duh, it was not a human nor a mechanical problem. Force majeure. One example of it, so what.
Emirates 407 -- well thank you, because that was a classic case of human error. Funny coincidence of you mentioning it -- just see yesterday's TDWTF story about Command 696 [thedailywtf.com]. ;)
Utter bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
"For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant.
There's been enormous progress in flight recorders. The first ones only recorded a few basic items, like altitude, airspeed, attitude, and control positions. The recording mechanism used a stainless steel tape, on which diamond points scratched graph lines. (Those were really rugged. That stainless steel tape could survive almost anything and still be read.)
Today's recorders are (inevitably) digital, recording perhaps a hundred parameters. Most key engine and airframe data is logged. They also record both what the pilot's control positions are and what the aircraft control surfaces are doing, which allows distinguishing between pilot error and control failure. There's a separate cockpit voice recorder. Enough data is recorded that the data can be loaded into an aircraft simulator and played back to reproduce the events.
Few flight recorders are not recovered. [wikipedia.org] In the last 10 years, there have been four failures to recover a flight recorder - two from 9/11, Air France Flight 447, and Siberia Airlines 1812. Of those, only Air France 447 [wikipedia.org] is still a mystery in which flight recorder data would be useful. And, in fact, Air France 447 was "phoning home", over a low-bandwidth maintenance link, reporting trouble with the air data sensors.
So there's an argument for sending more data back on the maintenance links, but this does not involve "the cloud".
Re:It's absolutely ridiculous (Score:1, Informative)
Really? Air France Flight 447 just falling apart in the sky going 537 mph at 35,000 is from a human failure? US Airways Flight 1549? Emirates Flight 407?
No, humans aren't the cause of all crashes, a chunk of them yes, but not close to "pretty much always".
Checking that out and looking up the causes of the accidents you'll see human error by the flight crew is a cause of some, but mechanical failure is a larger cause of accidents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_2009 [wikipedia.org]
And yes, I do have my pilot's license.
The breakup of AF 447 could very well have been pilot error. As a pilot, you are certainly aware of what your maximum entry speed into turbulence is for the aircraft you are flying.
Flying into a thunderstorm resulting in mechanical failure *is* the fault of the pilot.
Re:"Cloud computing" (Score:3, Informative)
It's not that difficult to continue to store the data locally and only back it up to the cloud when a connection's available.
Re:It's absolutely ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)
Rudder goes opposite control input- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues [wikipedia.org] - many crashes
AF 447 - likely due to pitot ice
So, if it is money the odds are the pilot, but it is hardly unheard of for a plane to fail.
Re:Welcome to Drudge-dot! (Score:3, Informative)
Does the article support the notion of the pilots unions fighting against modernization of flight recorders? No, it doesn't. Does common sense support such a notion? No, it doesn't either.
Did you read the same article I did?
The strongest institutional opposition has come from airline pilots, who fear that the practice would lead to full-scale monitoring of their work, much as it has for interstate truckers. In 2000, in reaction to the EgyptAir crash, the FAA tried to mandate cockpit cameras, but the U.S. pilots' union managed to prevent it. The rest of the world, which followed the U.S. lead, has also done nothing.
Do you not consider in-cockpit cameras to be a modernization of flight recorders?
Here's the first article that i dug up when searching for "pilots union" and cockpit recorders
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB124201244946205809.html [wsj.com]
Colgan Air Inc., which operated the [crashed] flight where 50 people died], is proposing to download and analyze random cockpit recordings in the future as a means of enhancing safety and enforcing cockpit discipline. The union representing Colgan's roughly 480 pilots is dead set against it.
If you keep searching, you'll only find more of the same.
Pilots Unions endlessly fight tooth and nail against anything that would impinge upon the cockpit.
Time/cost/hassle to get certified, plus liability (Score:4, Informative)
The biggest impediments are in the huge difficulties to get any new technology past the certification process and the cost of insuring against liability. (The liability issues around general aviation were ameliorated somewhat about 10-15 years ago with the passage of a law limiting the 'long tail' liability for older planes.)
My personal case in point - when I was taking flying lessons a long time ago, you could buy a brand new CB radio for about $50. An airplane VHF radio with not-that-much-different capabilities cost over $2000 at the time, had lousy audio and relatively poor reception compared to the CB radio.
The airplane radio had to pass both FCC and FAA (and, I think a couple of other institutions) certifications, each of which cost the manufacturer over $1 million for re-certification every time they wanted to change a resistor. Each of the parts had to go through the same process, which generally took several years. So the aviation radio was built out of ten-year-old parts using 8 year old designs, and the cost of each improvement had to be amortized over a few thousand units - so just getting certified can cost 1/4 to 1/3 of the cost of the part.
And the radios still suck.
Then, liability insurance was also about 1/3 of the retail cost of the radio. At that time if a private plane crashed, everyone within a mile of the crash sued the manufacturer of every component that had ever been on the plane. Still today, if a company makes a part that is on a commercial airplane, they are likely to get sued if the plane crashes, even if their part had nothing to do with anything, and their liability is essentially unlimited.
In one example I knew about (about 1985), a guy forgot to put fuel in his plane, took off and crashed into a house about 1/4 mile from the runway. One of the companies that was sued was the maker of the original OEM starters for that brand of airplane. They were sued for $millions. It cost them almost $5 million in legal fees to prove they were not at fault, even though their starter was not even on that plane - it had been replaced years before. They got out of the business, and never came back.
TOday we have the worst of possible worlds - the regulatory environment punishes innovation and makes it impossible for small companies to compete due to the infrastructure required to meet the regulatory requirements, and the liability environment stomps on them while they're down. So we have nothing but big monolithic industry giants with every incentive to not innovate, to not put the 'new thing' on. Boeing is being amazingly courageous in building the 787. They are betting the company not only on the marketability of the plane, but the potential liability.
Re:tape isn't bad (Score:1, Informative)
Remember, it has be stable in salt water, in high impact, humid environments, dry environments, wide temperature ranges, take electrical shock, etc.
Flash is better at all of those things than tape except electrical shock,
Umm, NO.
Let's examine this. First of all, let's assume the case, housing, container, etc. WILL be breached or missing entirely. After all, if we could make a 'perfect' case, we could put almost anything inside (including a monkey with a typewriter, my favorite form of data backup).
- Electrical Shock. You are correct, the magnetic tape is highly resistant to magnetic shock. And magnetic fields too, despite popular conceptions to the contrary.
- Stable in Saltwater. You are not correct. The problem is not just a matter of humidity or moisture exposure, but corrosion, and the potential for having an electric current generated by a chemical process. Flash chips don't like moisture, are highly susceptible to corrosion, and have some of the needed materials to generate current in salt water. Magnetic tape will retain its data while wet, you just need to dry it (and clean it), and the corrosion isn't much of an issue.
- High Impact. You are not correct. Magnetic tape is flexible, it can survive tremendous impact forces without damage or data loss. Flash chips can crack, and if warped or bent the chip will be damaged internally ruining all the data. The tape can be streteched or even cut into pieces and the data can still be retrieved.
- Humidity. (see stable in saltwater) Also, dry environments render flash vulnerable to static discharges, which will nuke the data. Tape can handle dry just fine- over enough time it will crack and become brittle, but this is also true of the plastic the flash chips are made from.
- Temperature: The only temperature problem tape has is if it gets hot enough to melt or burn. Flash chips if exposed to cold become very brittle, and if they shrink enough can break the internal wire connections (thus losing all you data). They will start to lose data well before they melt or burn- so while neither of them is great at the high temperature range the tape is still more robust. In addition, constant temperature changes will wreck havoc on the flash chips and they warp over time, eventually ruining the chip entirely.
And even if we assume that the physical medium itself is identical in terms of survivability, there is still another factor. Flash encodes data digitally- each storage location stores one binary value. Magnetic tape takes your digital data, and encodes it physically as an analog waveform (usually a square wave). This means that a tape can survive some damage to even a single data 'location', as long as part of the location is intact the data can still be recovered. Damage to a single storage spot on a flash chip will ruin that information permanently.
Some other things that might be a factor include:
Damage to the flash chip usually means the entire chip is bad- damage to part of the tape won't affect the rest of the tape.
Magnetic tape is less susceptible to radiation.
The big drawback to the tape is... it requires moving parts to record the data, where the flash does not.