Flight Data Recorders, Decades Out of Date 266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?"
"Cloud computing" (Score:5, Funny)
Trying to take that a bit literally, are we?
fp?
Dune Coons (Score:3, Insightful)
Really if this were a private Internet connection with an expectation of privacy they'd have come up with 20 different ways to monitor it, 5 of which wouldn't require a warrant due to bad precedent. A
100% buzz-word compliant, for your protection. (Score:2)
Not only that but the article conflates two different issues.
1. technology that COULD be improved (complete with buzz-words).
2. government/corporation control of data.
meh
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Those two issues, in this case, aren't unnecessarily conflated. It's technology that needs to be improved and can be improved and government/corporation control not of the data (it's already in government/corporation control) but of technological updates that could save lives.
When you are at work, you have no privacy from your employer except in the bathroom.
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Both having flight data recorders on the aircrafts and a data link could be done. However the bandwidth needed for a data link can limit the usefulness. Especially on transatlantic flights.
But the data recorders could be improved so that they do eject from the aircraft under certain conditions and equipped to be able to float to the surface for easier recovery.
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It's technology that needs to be improved and can be improved and government/corporation control not of the data (it's already in government/corporation control) but of technological updates that could save lives.
I'd argue that the tech doesn't need to be improved, just current tech applied!
As I understand it, BA already record vastly more information than is required in the black box and retrieve it from each 'plane when it lands. Obviously in the event of an accident this info is often/usually lost because it is outside the black box, but the collection of that flight data from successful flight is still useful. Now how about some of that nifty burst-transmission stuff the military use. How much info from the o
buzz-word compliance (Score:5, Funny)
Next week on slashdot, the aircraft that can post to twitter, and update it's own facebook status.
Air France 447 is now friends with Atlantic Ocean
Status: Crashed
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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.
tape isn't bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Tape is one of the best long term and reliable storage methods. As long as it doesn't burn (which kills any memory type), it's more stable in most situations than the modern memory devices. Remember, it has be stable in salt water, in high impact, humid environments, dry environments, wide temperature ranges, take electrical shock, etc.
People just think it sucks b/c it's old school and clunky.
Re:tape isn't bad (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as it doesn't burn (which kills any memory type), it's more stable in most situations than the modern memory devices. 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, and you can isolate the module with optical signals and power via induction (with its own fairly complex power supply in there on the other end, thus handling surges) or via optical power, which is horribly inefficient but who cares? It doesn't take much power to write flash, and turbines can be designed to produce basically any amount of electrical power you like.
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Flash is better at all of those things than tape except electrical shock, and you can isolate the module with optical signals and power via induction (with its own fairly complex power supply in there on the other end, thus handling surges) or via optical power, which is horribly inefficient but who cares? It doesn't take much power to write flash, and turbines can be designed to produce basically any amount of electrical power you like.
X2 on flash. Shoot, the black boxes could be made to do all of those things you mentioned to isolate it, and then the flash itself could be ruggedized in some fashion and have multiple redundant copies.
They could log every piece of information to recreate every aspect of the flight right down to every word spoken and button pushed, let alone flight path.
I think it comes down to the fact that they (pilots) don't want that level of scrutiny. Why not? Well, would you want it in your car?
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I think it comes down to the fact that they (pilots) don't want that level of scrutiny. Why not? Well, would you want it in your car?
Except you own the car, the pilots don't own the airplane they are flying and your car isn't carrying hundreds of passengers who are paying your employer for you to fly them to a destination. If I was a pilot I would welcome that level of scrutiny. Where am I going wrong so that I can improve my skills as a pilot.
Re:tape isn't bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you feel comfortable with a keystroke logger installed on your work computer by your employer?
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If my job was such that typos at any time could kill hundreds of people in minutes, then yes.
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Except that is not how the data would be used. Every infraction would be used as a reason to fire someone, and hire a less-expensive employee. And in case of any accident or incident, any unrelated error would be fodder for extended lawsuits. Any minor failure in a judgement call would be costly. If the pilots debate turning on the "fasten seatbelt" annunciator based on a marginal rad
Re:tape isn't bad (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Out of date? (Score:3, Interesting)
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OP, you may have a point but you've argued awfully (Score:3, Interesting)
Cloud computing? Conflation of data not being recorded and the choice to be secret about what's recorded? Technologically simple solutions with "hundreds of I/O points"?
Rather than hand-waving over every single modern technology which might be remotely relevant to the flight recorder, how about writing down, point by point, each improvement you feel should be made and why you feel it would be beneficial. Mention deployments to flying aircraft as well as destruction testing which has been done. IOW, what that is broken are you able to fix?
And, yes, pilot privacy is a concern because certain well-known air crashes have involved the airline and/or even government falsifying data to put the blame on the pilots (cue fingers wagged at France).
Buzzwords (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would a black box need to use cloud computing or mesh networks?
Just because new technologies have emerged doesn't mean they are necessarily applicable in all areas of computing. My knowledge in this field is limited, but I just don't see the point of a twittering black box, or whatever web 2.0 meme is the flavor of the day.
Re:Buzzwords (Score:5, Funny)
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They're (hopefully) not talking about using EC2, but just using those terms as shortcuts for the principles they embody: storage over network, so your data is somewhere else, preferably redundantly.
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Airliners send your boss a text message if you exceed various limits. Why not a Twit as well? :P
FAIL (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:FAIL (Score:5, Insightful)
You also left out the part about the government hiding crucial data. You know like when Grey's cause a plane to crash or when the Illuminati shoot one down to see how we will react. Where is my tin foil hat?
What people don't understand is that you are
more likely to die in your car or hit by lightning than in an airliner crash. It is a flashy news worthy event when it happens because it is so rare.
Here is the big question. How many times has a black box not been found? And how many times has the lack of one caused other planes to crash?
The airlines are already adding real time telemetry to their new airlines if for no other reason than to improve maintenance. The older black boxes are getting replaced be newer and better ones. The old ones do actually work very well and have provided the data needed to improve safety over the years.
So for this most part this whole thing is a paranoid issue with very little merit in the big scheme of things.
Re:FAIL (Score:5, Insightful)
You also left out the part about the government hiding crucial data. You know like when Grey's cause a plane to crash or when the Illuminati shoot one down to see how we will react. Where is my tin foil hat?
What people don't understand is that you are
more likely to die in your car or hit by lightning than in an airliner crash. It is a flashy news worthy event when it happens because it is so rare.
Here is the big question. How many times has a black box not been found? And how many times has the lack of one caused other planes to crash?
Well unless my logic 101 professor in college failed miserably, it is impossible to know if a box which was never found could have prevented another crash.
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a bit for unions a bit for bureaucracy... (Score:5, Insightful)
The rabid tone of the summary is completely unsupported by the article itself. Does the submitter have any evidence that advancements are held back by unions, bureaucracy and privacy concerns? The article does not claim anything like that.
They are just proposing a replacement technology with a catchy name. The submitter is a massive troll.
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.
uh...what? (Score:3, Interesting)
...citing privacy concerns of the flight crew.
Not only are you on the job (which means your privacy is significantly reduced by default), you're job involves being responsible for hundreds of lives. I'm sorry that you're worried about people potentially overhearing you and the co-pilot talking about that hot piece of new flight attendant, but recording flight data is just a bit more important.
Pompous assholes.
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Cockpit crew conversation during critical operational windows is supposed to follow "sterile cockpit rules", and is restricted to topics pertaining to the operation of the flight.
Comments about flight attendants on approach or during takeoff might be grounds for disciplinary action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_Cockpit_Rule [wikipedia.org]
Note: I am not a pilot, but I've seen one! :-)
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AUUUUUGHHHH! I try so hard to get them all right...every now and then one of them slips past me :( ::hangs head in shame::
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Do you want everything you say and do at work logged every day?
If people's lives depended on me, absolutely.
Conservative Tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the pipeline is so long, the FAA ought to, years ago, have put a development program in place. They should model it along the lines of a DARPA program: one- or two-year commitments with substantial deliverables. Want to play again next year? Better deliver this year. When the contract's up, the money's done. They ought to pit competing factions against each other: have development teams one year become destructive testers of someone else's hardware the next year.
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Am I missing something here? Keep the existing black box tech, you don't have to remove it, but *simultaneously* transmit the info where possible. That way you have the best of both worlds.
By the way, there was some ACARS info transmitted for Air France Flight 447, which people have talked little about. ACARS seems like the kind of thing that's needed, just ramp up the information being transmitted... can't you do that?
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ACARS messages tend to be relatively small and tend to be somewhat expensive to send (charges are usually on a per message basis), so while ACARS is often used for things like WX alerts and NOTAMs, interrogating engine parameters, takeoff and performance numbers, etc., a continuous stream of ACARS data from an aircraft is probably not something an airline would want.
Hard to say, though. The tech is very useful, and maybe it would be in this instance.
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And you run into politics very quickly.
Why do you think cockpit voice recorders are so limited, when we can stuff in enough flash and/or RAID-1 a pile of SSDs for hours of CD-quality audio storage? Literally - you can take a many SSDs together, mirror them all, and have hundreds of hours of audio at CD-quality. A bit less
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When engines, generators, hydraulics and pneumatics (are there any?) have failed on a fly-by-wire plane, there's no point in recording anything anymore. Well, there is a point if you want to see how a plane behaves with unactuated control surfaces, but that's of academic interest and beside the point of determining why it crashed. Because crash it will.
Loss of engine power does not imply that a fly-by-wire plane is unflyable. As long as you have hydraulics and ram-air turbine, you can still fly it. Won't do
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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)
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I believe he understands what a RAT is.. if you look he said "you have hydraulics and ram-air turbine" in relation to a comment on a fly by wire..
so he was basically saying if you lose hydraulics having a RAT won't do you any good as both have to be functional in the case of loss of main power.
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OK, one learns something every day. So a RAT supplies electric actuators, and not simply a hydraulic pump? Good to know.
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I didn't say anything about how the RAT works. I only said that as long as (some of) your hydraulic systems are operable, and you have RAT, you can fly a fly-by-wire plane. So we agree here.
I never said that RAT provides academic benefits. I merely said that the GP's claim about all subsystems being out is pretty much made up. Theoretically possible, but didn't happen just yet.
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If you want the same black box technology, accessible by any accident investigator in any country, and you want it in every plane regardless of manufacturer, then you cannot rely on manufacturers to do that job. Being experts, they certainly should be utilized in the research, design, specifying, regulation, and manufacture of such systems. But it does ultimately have to come
Constant telemetry... (Score:5, Interesting)
A direct telemetry feed to ground stations or via satellite could be a very interesting way to monitor the airplanes and give crucial information in the even of a crash, but could not replace an on-board logging device. In the even of catastrophic malfunction, on-board recorders are most likely more reliable than networked data. But in the even the on-board recorder is lost, the telemetry feed could give most of the required information on the systems leading and the events leading to the malfunction.
To some extent, these systems already exist and are used by maintenance crew to schedule maintenance and get early warnings on possible problems with the airplane.
Having a global system that is not company-based, but centralized and international could give not only make incident reconstitution easier, but might also improve transparency on aircraft maintenance on less "serious" airlines and provide real time information (wetter radar feed, wind shear data, turbulence, etc.) to air traffic control and weather forecasters to improve safety overall.
The major technical issue that this would bring is a problem of bandwidth. There are a lot of aircraft in the air and it would generate huge amounts of data. Transmission, storage and analysis would all be challenge.
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Personally, I'm not too anxious for constant satellite telemetry to be a mandatory part of the equipment. I don't think too many people would be happy to hear that their flight was canceled/delayed to install a new satellite transmitter on the plane.
The major technical issue is 100% fail-safe reliability. With decent compression, the bandwidth shouldn't be that big a thing.
Re:Constant telemetry...is a reality (Score:2, Interesting)
There is nothing technically preventing this. It's already being done. GE Aviation engines can be fitted with technology to report, in real time, the behavior of engines on a plane while it is still in the air.
It wouldn't be a stretch to extend the telemetry to other plane systems.
http://www.geae.com/services/information/diagnostics/tier.html [geae.com]
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Constant Telemetry is difficult even for things within close proximity, say 60 miles. Ask NASA about all of the channels of data that come out of the Shuttle during launch including the RSRMs, Safe/Arm Devices, temp sensors.. It goes on and on. Each one of those traditionally would be a discrete channel necessitating bandwidth. Then you have the Spectrum Licensing, how to you share space etc? You could
possibly do a cellular packet switched arrangement but again, it's hard enough to get Wifi on Planes to
Aviation age predates the information age (Score:2)
There are plenty of people willing to work on bringing aviation into the information age, but it's a slow, costly process. Have to get the main stakeholders: the FAA, the commercial airliners, the pilots' unions, and the air traffic control unions to all agree on the way forward, and none of them particularly like to talk to each other. The systems we have now aren't particularly great, but they work and have enjoyed a decent safety and efficiency record... even though there's much room for improvement.
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I don't live in the USA. But...
The USA sets the standard. If the FAA won't touch it, pretty much no-one else will, since their product will be useless in one of the top markets in the world, and I'm pretty sure the other major markets just follow the example of the USA anyway.
Also, indeed, it seems the experimental crowd grows smaller. I am 30, and by a huge margin the whippersnapper of the local EAA chapter. I'm not even that active, but I'm trying to get a plane built "someday". That's more than I can say
Proven Technology (Score:2)
I think one of the main reasons why there's so little 'improvement' in these things, is that they're very wary of using newer (and possibly less robust, less reliable) technology.
Similar to the fact that NASA is still using CPUs from 20 years ago, since they all have a proven track record, are resilient under stress, less prone to external influences, etc.
However I do think that newer technology used in parallel with the current existing hardware would in the end give us proof whether it's as reliable, more
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Similar to the fact that NASA is still using CPUs from 20 years ago, since they all have a proven track record, are resilient under stress, less prone to external influences, etc.
NASA is using antique hardware because it has been rad-hardened. Smaller feature sizes are less resistant to bit flipping by cosmic rays, and fancy new processes haven't been moved to the exotic semiconductor substrates that are sometimes used for radiation-hardened processors. And of course, a processor that doesn't rely on microcode is much easier to prove out your code on. They could use something newer but still simple, but given these restrictions there's no point.
are you back, /.? (Score:2)
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Welcome to Drudge-dot! (Score:3, Insightful)
held back by a combination of aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions and the slow gears of government bureaucracy
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.
Really, this is not a place for union bashing. If you have an axe to grind, so be it. But don't try to wield your axe at every conceived opportunity, or you'll end up making yourself look silly - as you just did.
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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 represe
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Just look at the news and see all the crazy things unions do that dont make sense (unless you are pro-union).
Can you provide an actual example of such an action? People love to go on with "my cousin's best friend's aunt's hairdresser's husband's kid's teacher heard a story about ..." but yet they can't provide a source for such an event happening.
Whereas people who have had their eyes open in the last couple of decades have noticed that unions have consistently been losing power for roughly the last 20 years. Membership is down across the country (in part because they have so little power) and anti-union acti
Telemetry (Score:3, Interesting)
According to a TV show I watched on the subject some a while back, British Airways have been taking live telemetry from their planes for years.
Privacy? Really? (Score:2)
Pilot unions have objected to the collection and sharing of detailed accident data, citing privacy concerns of the flight crew.
I wasn't aware any reasonable expectation of privacy existed while working on a 4-8 person crew serving a couple hundred people in a space the size of a double-wide mobile home. Not to mention, just what other profession entitles you to privacy while at work, especially the sort of work where owners and direct supervisors are almost never in the same time zone as a given employee? They apparently feel entitled to privacy in a case where privacy would mean no oversight whatsoever.
Radio broadcast (Score:2)
Just have the darned black box broadcast all of its data once every millisecond. Put receivers on satellites and on grounds stations or even on other planes. Give the transmitter a range of several thousand miles, and come up with some scheme to avoid broadcast collisions (either time or code division multiplexing).
If a plane goes down go back to the recorded transmissions, of which there should be multiple copies.
+1 Redundancy (Score:2)
Call me crazy, but data duplication might help in some way; particularly off site backups when a signal is available, coupled with multiple storage points on the aircraft itself.
This is a good idea. (Score:2)
If you stoop to RTFA you'll see there's a lot of sensible stuff in it, with the two main points being: flight data recorders record a limited (25h) sliding window of data, and that you have to go and fine them and sometimes this isn't possible. Both those make crash investigations harder than they might be, and delay the results. If you could get results more quickly and reliably, that'd obviously be a good thing.
The author doesn't suggest a sudden wholesale replacement of black boxes, but a supplementary m
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Is that you Jon Katz? (Score:2)
Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)
Sure... "lost" under the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Uh huh.
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The impact zone had immense heat from the jet fuel for several minutes followed by the hydrocarbon burning of all the plastics (this was the real contributor
"Advances of cloud computing" are being held back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that "Cloud Computing" as a buzzword is only about two years old, and has yet to receive a great deal of commercial deployment, I think we can hardly blame the FAA, NTSB, Boeing, Airbus, and airlines for not deploying it Right The Heck Now.
What does that even mean, to use "Cloud Computing" for the "black box"? Cloud Computing has about as coherent of a definition as the previous buzzword du jour, "Web 2.0".
SirWired
No Brainer. (Score:2)
A lot of technology in Avionics, for decades, has been stagnant. It might not seem so when we grovel over a F22 Raptor or the Russian PAK FA fighter. Not to belittle the development of these crafts, really it's the vector thrust that primarily puts them in their league. Much of the planes are the same as much older planes going as far back as the 60s. For example, MIL-STD 1553B is on that F22 Raptor and it probably has TADIL support and maybe even JTIDS if it's really 'bleeding edge'. MIL-STD 1553B is
apples and oranges (Score:2)
"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?"
Answer: None. You're asking a bunch of people who presumably have IT experience to play armchair engineer and second guess the designers of embedded systems that are designed not only to record data on aircraft controls, time, and position, but to permit recovery of that data if th
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]
Hello? McFly? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the lesson, "Never save data that can only serve to get you sued out of existance if something bad happens".
Until there's tort reform in the USA to bring us in line with countries like Germany, this data will never be captured or saved.
Opposition to Telemetry (Score:2)
Most of the data needed for accident investigations could be transmitted in real time for logging on the ground, the only need for a "black box" would be to cover periods where communication is lost - like in the last few minutes of a catastrophe. Like everyone, flight crews object to having every moment of their work day subjected to surveillance by their employers - hence their objection to transmitting flight data and crew conversations for recording on the ground.
The flight crew union objections could
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".
Pilots union needs to STFU (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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One important thing to point out, is that when the aircraft attitude is so messed up that the sat link is no longer reliable, the crucial events that lead to the crash already occurred. We don't really need to now how the plane crashed into the ground, we need to know why and what lead to it. Nevertheless, on board recoding should not be replaced by telemetry.
As for the value of such a system, if its only used for analysis in the event of a crash, I think its a waste of money. But if its used for more than
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Its my understanding the tape hasn't been used in new flight recorders for quite some time. I think they're all solid state now.
Yeh, I'll get off your lawn.
Still, the summary is atrocious buzz-word bingo. The article is better written but the 'glass box' basically amounts to broadcasting the black box data on the go. Hardly a revolutionary idea, with a sugar coating. If it doesn't exist currently there is probably a reason - technical (bandwidth requirements) or otherwise (cost) - that is not outweighed by
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.
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"Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error."
-HAL 9000
But seriously, the actual source of most plane crashes is a combination of a lot of factors: mechanical problems, pilot error, management practices (such as overworking pilots to the point where they're more likely to commit a pilot error), weather, a certain amount of bad luck, poorly maintained airport facilities (part
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I agree wholeheartedly. But still the human usually fails -- not always the pilot. Of course you need to draw a line somewhere, lest you classify, say structural engineering failures as human errors too. When we reduce controlled flights into terrain (CFITs) by an order of magnitude or two, then I can come back to revise my skewed worldview ;)
Re:It's absolutely ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
You're absolutely correct about redundancy. There's a long chain of things that is supposed to happen before any flight. Here's what has to happen before I fly my little rental Cessna 172:
That isn't even all of it, and the list is more complete for a plane that actually has a black box. There are other things that happen along the way that aren't part of official checklists, including brake checks, validating compass and heading indicator accuracy, using the radio, and just paying attention for anything that doesn't feel right. There are checklists for take-off, climb, leveling, descent, landing, post-landing, and shut-down, not to mention all the emergency checklists. I've got a stall warning horn as well that is a function of the aerodynamics of the plane, and the autopilot lets me know if it's disabled. I fly a G1000 version of the C172 with two big displays, and it's got even more alerts, both visual and audio, to let me know when something is amiss, including when traffic is close (gotta love TCAS). I usually fly with flight following anyway, so ATC can help me avoid other planes (and vice versa). I'm still always on the lookout for other traffic, though.
If something goes wrong, it's almost certainly my fault that I didn't notice something, planned poorly, or flew beyond my skills (pilot error), with a small chance that the A&P and/or IA missed something (still human error), a very, very tiny chance that there was a mechanical issue that was not addressable with inspections, and an almost infinitesimal chance of simple bad luck.
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Well, to be fair modern aircraft have some silly things.
Take the ERJ-140 (regional jet) - turn on bleed air from either or both turbines without shutting off and disconnecting the APU bleed, and the APU will explode, shooting the compressor component of it straight out the tail of the Jet.
It (alone, anyways) won't crash the plane, but this is a simple as pushing a button before turning a knob... and the knob is surrounded by the buttons. Watch your fingers, eh?
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WTF didn't they put an interlock of some sort? FAIL.
Re:It's absolutely ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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]. ;)
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The ATSB investigation found that an incorrect flex temp was applied, based on an incorrectly entered aircraft weight. This resulted in a lower than necessary engine thrust and consequently insufficient acceleration and airspeed.
On the others, I will agree with you.
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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.
I believe this assertion to be true, but do not have data to support it. I'm certain the data exist, though.
However, there have been some recent mechanical failures that were very important to understand because of the wide-spread safety implications. I'm thinking mostly of the problem with lubrication of the horizontal stabilizer lead screw on MD83 aircraft from 10 years ago that resulted in at least one crash and the grounding of the fleet (and, now that I've reviewed the incident on Wikipedia, it also
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I agree that everything with safety implications should be subject of scrutiny. It's just that human factors are very widely misunderstood. You have mechanics who can inspect any flying hardware, but good luck finding a "mechanic" who can examine a pilot to determine if he/she is fit for flying that day.
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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.
In a few cases in recent years (probably including the AF447 crash) the plane has been flying along on autopilot until the autopilot runs into something that it can't manage to fly through, and then it shuts down and dumps the problem on the pilots. In some cases they can handle weather that's too turbulent for a computer, in others they crash. Is that a 'human problem' or a programming problem or a 'flying into weather that we wouldn't try to fly through manually but we have an autopilot so that's OK' prob
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1. The pilots must be trained how to specifically deal with taking over a system with unknown state.
2. Since #1 is prone to all sorts of problems, it's better to avoid. Thus pilots must be trained to oversee and keep current their mental image of the aircraft's status.
3. Since #2 breaks down, #1 is still important.
IIRC, in AF447 there were strong indications that the air data system was failing. A known problem. I think that weather only added to the airframe stresses, but primarily the pilots overstressed
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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.
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I actually suggested this project at my company. Put a couple dozen hardened flash backup devices at various points in the collection stream, scattered throughout the plane structure. The project wasn't approved, but I still think it's a great idea.
Your foam ball idea is a great addition to this.
Re:Damn unions... (Score:4, Funny)
Passengers are represented by unions?
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If they aren't now, give them 10 more years. ;)