The $100,000 Device That Could Have Solved Missing Plane Mystery 461
First time accepted submitter evidencebase writes "How can an airliner simply disappear, leaving no clues? And why do we have to wait until the black boxes are found to learn what happened to Flight MH370? As this article explains, there's no good reason that flight data needs to go down with the plane, because the technology to stream it to ground, from the moment things start to go wrong, is already on the market. It can be fitted to a commercial airliner for less than $100,000. But the industry has decided that it's not worth the expense. Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Does it really cost $100k? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or does it cost $100k PLUS the cost of labor and maintanence to install the device PLUS the huge cost of taking the plane out of service for x amount of time while the device is being installed (even if its installed at the same time as other maintanence is done, its still a non-zero cost)
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Yeah, it really costs $100k. Custom Iridium devices of this character aren't terribly expensive, on the order of $500k to $1M to design and $5k-$10k each to manufacture in small quantities. The rest is the cost of putting it on the plane, maintaining it and paying for satellite service.
Iridium is an LEO satellite constellation. You only send the radio signal a few hundred miles, you you can basically point an antenna generically at the sky and talk. It doesn't require the kind of complex engineering that ta
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100K? no, it's not a lot of money when looking at the cost of an airplane.
Ticket increase might have been pennies.
$100K is a lot of money if ... (Score:2)
Nevertheless, $100k is a lot of money...
True, $100K may be a lot of money, if it's the price you pay to put a device into your $10K car.
But we are talking about a jet plane that is worth $100M and up.
What is the ratio of $100K to the original plane pricetag of $100M ? 1: 1000
Allow me to put it in the context of your car - Let's say your car's price tag is $10K, What will that device cost you, if it's 1000th of your car ? $10 ??
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Wait, the sat service is already in place. You are simply talking about another data channel interleaved on the existing data channels these planes already stream back to the airlines and to Boeing/Airbus.
If airlines are going to start feeding passengers internet access they surely have time to insert a few OOB packets for event recording. I believe some of this is part of ACAS data streams.
The flight in question had GPS tracking for flight arrival information.
It went dead the same time as everything els
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No, $100k is not a lot of money. Consider just the fuel cost: 10 hours flying time by a Boeing 747 consumes 36,000 gallons of fuel [howstuffworks.com]. That's around $100k or more.
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The slashvertisement did mention the technology used in AF 447: ACARS. MH 370 may have been equipped with ACARS as well, but if it was, it would not be transmitting via satellite as there is no sat antenna on the vanished plane (9M-MRO). In fact, Malaysia Air has been pretty cagey about whether or not 9M-MRO had ACARS. If 9M-MRO *did* have ACARS installed, and the information *could have been* received/recorded there's still the question of whether or not Malaysia Air was paying for upkeep. If Malaysia
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again, the free market fails where regulation would succeed - the former can only correct for the future AFTER everyone's dead and un-buried.
Why do you say that? What makes YOU the authority on the "correct" answer? Maybe people are perfectly comfortable with the status quo - after all, it's not like this box would save anyone, it would just help to find their corpses a little sooner. Considering only a few hundred people a year die in commercial plane crashes (vs around 100 million total deaths per year), and the vast majority of those are found very quickly, it's not really that big of a deal. There are probably better ways to spend $100K per plane to improve the flying experience (safer, more comfortable, less TSA, whatever), yet you've suddenly decided that the best thing to do would have been to bump this box (which you never even heard of until today) to the top of the list!
Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more likely you could use that same money to find a lot more than a couple dozen people by spending it more intelligently. The only thing that makes these people special is that they were rich enough to afford trans-pacific plane tickets, and they're in the news. If you think that makes them more important than other people, then YOU are the one barely attached to human reality.
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Once again, the free market fails where regulation would succeed - the former can only correct for the future AFTER everyone's dead and un-buried.
They'd be just as fucking dead even if you knew where to find the bodies.
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Should we remove radios and radar and GPS from the planes too? After all, they're just another thing that can break.
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Should we remove radios and radar and GPS from the planes too?
Some planes in the US don't fly with any of that stuff. But in cases where those items are mandatory (which I gather is the case for commercial flight), then you don't fly when that equipment is broken.
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Great.
Should we remove that equipment, or are we better off with it?
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Should we remove that equipment, or are we better off with it?
That's the question that should be asked about any such equipment. We have both costs and benefits more or less laid out. The benefit is that it provides better information for the times that planes are lost - when it works. And costs are that it's another critical piece of gear that has to work in order for the plane to fly. That's not just a $100k one time cost.
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The cost is because it is "on an airplane" meaning it needs to be certified by FAA and other alphabet soup agencies around the world. And forget about firmware updates...
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:4)
What does it matter, on a plane like the 777 that costs $260 to $377 *million* dollars to acquire? That's less than 4 hundreths of a percent of the acquisition cost. 100K$ is peanuts on the scale of costs it takes to acquire and operate a large airliner.
And since it is not, strictly speaking, a piece of *safety* equipment, there's no need to take planes out of service to install it. Just require it on new planes, and maybe retrofit existing large airliners when they're down for major maintenance.
It seems likely to me that the probably reason this device isn't required is engineering conservatism. Before something like this is required, you have to convince people that (a) it's a good idea, and (b) this is a good implementation of that good idea.
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:4, Insightful)
What does it matter, on a plane like the 777 that costs $260 to $377 *million* dollars to acquire? That's less than 4 hundreths of a percent of the acquisition cost. 100K$ is peanuts on the scale of costs it takes to acquire and operate a large airliner.
Costs to acquire are often not the highest costs. Same with this, it may cost $100K to purchase, but how much to keep running?
I read the article, the technology is flawed in two ways.
1, it depends on the instrumentation or pilots detecting something going wrong. One of the leading theories in the AF447 accident was that an instrument was reporting incorrectly.
2. it depends on satellite communication (which isn't cheap) and MH370 disappeared from RADAR and radio communications. What makes you think a dial on demand satellite connection would work.
Besides this, much like the summary the article is full of half baked assumptions, attacks on the aviation industry, emotive language and thought terminating cliche's in the place of fact or at least tests and results. The aviation industry rejected their devices before because they dont add any real value due to the flaws I mentioned above. They are essentially trying to use a tragedy to sell something of dubious value whilst people are too emotional to think critically. I think FLYHT are scum.
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm confused, is it a "huge" cost, or a "non-zero" cost?
Both, because you need to multiply it by planes in service.
A few seconds on Google shows there are around 20,000 registered commercial airliners, and around 145,000 registered aircraft (including commercial aircraft, corporate jets, personal airplanes, military aircraft, and so on.) It doesn't include non-registered aircraft, of which there are many.
But the costs multiply. So when you start with $100K for the device plus installation, you are looking at $14B for the first pass. Then your small annual fee multiplies to perhaps fifty million every year in upkeep and service fees.
If you are talking about a major aircraft like a commercial B777 passenger craft, the installation and upkeep is relatively small. These massive aircraft are expensive to buy and maintain. The amortized cost per passenger over a year's flights is going to be a fraction of a cent.
When you are talking about smaller craft like the super common Cessna 172, the device is going to be about 1/4 of the cost of the airplane. All the little utility aircraft are the most common type of aircraft, even though most of us only associate airplanes with the giant cargo jets and passenger flights.
Ultimately let's assume they are looking around $14B initial investment plus $50M/year continuous cost. All of that money to get a little information once every few years when an airplane gets lost over the ocean. Is it worth it? Perhaps it is worth it for the large commercial passenger airlines, but not for all aircraft.
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are talking about a major aircraft like a commercial B777 passenger craft, the installation and upkeep is relatively small. These massive aircraft are expensive to buy and maintain. The amortized cost per passenger over a year's flights is going to be a fraction of a cent.
Come on, let's do some math instead of just guessing at the answer: if a plane seats 200 people, flies 4 segments/day, 300 days/year, and the device has a useful life of 10 years, that's $100K / 10 / 300 / 4 / 200 = about 4 cents per passenger segment. An order of magnitude more than "a fraction of a cent", but still pretty close to negligible.
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people involved in an airplane crash survive the accident.
are you high? did you just drink some sizzurp? why would you think that most people in an airplane crash survive the accident? Note that the only planes that could benefit from this locator are planes that disappear in mid-flight, because if they have a crash on the ground or in take-off/landing, then everybody already knows where it is.
I assure you that when a plane falls out of the sky somewhere over the ocean, the survival rate is not high.
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:4, Informative)
why would you think that most people in an airplane crash survive the accident?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=airplane+... [lmgtfy.com]
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According to that link there's an article which helps break data down.
One thing to note is that I didn't get a good definition for what constitutes an accident so the only thing I have to go off of is "fatal accident".
40% of fatal accidents occur during landing. Survival rates were 18% in 1970s and 20% in 2000-2009.
En route accidents result with survival rates of 11% in 1970s and 7% In 2000-2009.
What the data does show is that if you have a serious accident during a flight, your chances of survival are grea
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Actually, I would suspect an ocean landing to generally have a higher initial survival rate than an overland one. After all you're presumably gliding in at speed, and the ocean tends to be a lots smoother,softer, and less obstacle-filled than land. If both wings fall off and you literally fall out of the sky on the other hand, well then yeah, survival rates are likely extremely low no matter what's underneath you, but that's an *extremely* rare case. Far more likely that you partially lose engines, contr
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimately let's assume they are looking around $14B initial investment plus $50M/year continuous cost.
Why are we assuming that? A Cessna 172 has a maximum takeoff weight of 2400 pounds, while cockpit voice recorders are required on aircraft with a MTOW of over 12,500 pounds (5700kg). Why are we assuming that this technology to supplement a black box is going to be required on aircraft where a black box is not currently required?
This is aside from my initial point of calling out the parent because he sounds like a black box manufacturing shill opposed to any technology that might some day replace a black box, using easily-fungible terms like "huge cost" followed up by, well, it's at least a non-zero cost.
This is also aside from the fact that a private aircraft owner does not lose anything when his aircraft is "out of service". He's not losing passenger dollars. If I open up my Cessna or Piper for maintenance it doesn't cost me anything other than the parts. In short, exclude aircraft with a MTOW of less than 5700kg from your calculation and it will be much more realistic. Figure out how many aircraft are currently flying around with black boxes and you'll at least be in the neighborhood.
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Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:5, Funny)
we're missing the obvious solution to the communication problem. why not make it illegal for planes to fly over water? then they'll always be in contact with land. sometimes the problem is right in front of you!
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree,
Maintenance schedules are already extremely tight, and there is a great deal of engineering change procedures that would need to go into fitting something like this to ensure it actually works without making the aircraft fall out of the sky (would kind of make the device redundant). Mods are made, but not without extensive rigour and testing.
(And yes, I have worked in an aircraft through-life support industry)
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:5, Funny)
Can't we just get the copilot to throw the black box out of the window before they hit the sea?
Much cheaper...
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I had wanted to say just that. ...for only 100k, they'd still be dead, but, well, perhaps not.
Knowing exactly where a plane lands in the water might give an opportunity for an at-sea rescue of possible survivors -- should a giant plane smacking into the water allow for such a thing.
Of course, the cost versus lives always reminds me of this:
Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
How much are those boxes? What's the cost to install them everywhere? What's our likelihood of a lawsuit?
Re:Does it really cost $100k? (Score:5, Insightful)
How much are those boxes? What's the cost to install them everywhere? What's our likelihood of a lawsuit?
Multiply by the 78 other devices that might save a life one flight in 400 million.
Or just accept that airline travel is already exceedingly safe, and surprisingly cheap, and choose to fly or not.
should a giant plane smacking into the water allow for such a thing.
Technically, yes - see the Hudson river landing for a fine example. But see my point above, and accept that sometimes you hit the sea so hard you die from the impact, sometimes you drown, and sometimes - if you're lucky, just like 28 million other people that day - you land safely at your destination.
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NO, black box recovery is a huge pain in the ass and it's dangerous.
However many planes have a system ALREADY INSTALLED, it's just used for maintenance.
And 100K really isn't much for an item that will be paid off over 30 years and 10's of thousands of passengers.
How many gallons of fuels does a 747 hold?
How much do you think it costs to fill up a 747?
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just about 50,000 gallon, at about 6 bucks a gallon.
so 300K to fill it.
I used 747 to illistrate how little you know about airline numbers. Also, I happ
not worth it (Score:4, Insightful)
black boxes are almost always recovered. the only thing it would save is a big oceanic search -- how often does that happen?
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COSPAS-SARSAT is not useful unless the aircraft ELT is activated (manually or automatically), intact, and and above ground/water. The aircraft ELT is not active/visible and the crew never called mayday, squawked 7500 (hijacked), 7600 (radio failure) or 7700 (emergency). That's why this is quite a mystery.
Re:not worth it (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that $100k is per aircraft. So two billion dollars for the world's commercial fleets. (around 20,000 jetliners)
That's makes the search and recovery of black boxes look cheap. Very rarely is one lost permanently.
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NO IT DOES NOT. Does no one here have a grasp of basic business accounting, and large numbers?
It cost 500K to fill at 747 with fuel.
This devices would be a 1 time 100k cost spread out of 30 years, and be paid for by millins and million of tickets.
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The systems will require maintenance, periodic testing, and failure diagnosis. Also, it's likely that some sort of upgrades would be required over a 30 year service period.
Deploying these widely would also require maintaining the Iridium system indefinitely (rarely is a "safety feature" eliminated once instituted).
Characterizing it as "one time only" cost is not accurate although I have no idea what recurring costs would be.
Re:not worth it (Score:5, Insightful)
We are not saying it is unaffordable.
We say the cost exceeds the very rare benefits.
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how often does that happen?
About every five years, apparently.
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black boxes are almost always recovered
Except when planes crash?
Seems the 9/11 planes' were lost too. http://911research.wtc7.net/pl... [wtc7.net]
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Those boxes might have been lost, but you couldn't possibly have picked a less credible site.
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Plus, technically they weren't lost. We know where they ended up. In landfill.
I mean, in the wreckage of the two-towers.
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Seems the 9/11 planes' were lost too.
Damnit. Just think, if we would have recovered that equipment then we could have figured out why the planes crashed.
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Flight data and cockpit voice recorders are only ever recovered when the plane crashes. "Recovering" them before then is called "maintenance."
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The cost of recovery is more then the cost of one of these. Here is a novel idea, what is it was live and we didn't need to recover, faulty, black boxes anymore?
Lat / Long? (Score:5, Interesting)
- Flight Number
- Lat / Long
- Airspeed
- Groundspeed
- Altitude
- Compass heeding
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That's very doable and could probably be put in one or maybe a couple of packets of data. Given that I know nothing specifically about airplane systems, still one would expect you could install a stand alone black box that gathers and transmits this data w/o even integrating it into any systems besides onboard power. Relative compass heading and airspeed are easily derivable from last GPS positions. I can't understand why it would REQUIRE 100K per plane to do this.
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It could work along the same lines as the early shared-bandwidth ethernet model:
Re:Lat / Long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lat / Long? (Score:4, Funny)
Something like that already exists [wikipedia.org].
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They already do that. That system failed for an unknown reason.
Also, at 900fps, a jet travels in the neighborhood of 50 miles just between 5 minute beacons. It's better than nothing, but a 50 mi x N mi grid search of the ocean floor is pretty much a non-starter in most areas of the globe.
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Fine, as long as we don't make it a *general* policy to adopt Steve Ballmer's jargon [seattlepi.com].
snark (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, would that somehow bring them back to life?
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Re:snark (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously don't know about the concept of closure, or care enough about someone else to care about it.
Because some company using a tragedy to peddle their wares that have dubious value and are not even remotely guaranteed to work is closer.
Pot, meed kettle.
FLYHT are scum. Their products have been rejected by the aviation industry because they don't add value but add additional cost (satellite data connections aren't cheap), are just as prone to failure as current methods (relies on instrumentation or manual activation) and have additional points of failure (a dial on demand satellite connection, when a flight disappears from radar and the pilots cannot be raised on the radio and the transponder is gone... WTF makes me think a dial on demand satellite connection will work). And now they're using a tragedy to try to peddle their crud.
I read the article, it's nothing but attacks on the aviation industry and badly used thought terminating cliche's like "tell that to the families". Its the kind of thing an angry pre-pubescent child would write when their parents ground them.
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Dammit, kids, some of us have to get up in the morning and go to work.
Any more noise from the basement and I'm coming down there to knock your heads together.
"Tell the families"? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been what, over three days now, with an aircraft that disappeared from radar at commercial cruising altitude without so much as a burst of garbled obscenities from the flight crew. Do you think that your family is clinging to those little flotation-device pillows, awaiting a rescue that would have come in time if only for upgraded real-time blackbox transmission?
If anybody derives some sort of comfort from whatever they do manage to find, all the better; but this is all trying to recover data for failure analysis, not survivors.
Now, if you want to justify real-time transmission, check out the amount of (incidentally not paid for by the airline) search gear that has been diverted from Malaysian, Chinese, and other sources to looking for the debris. Whole bunch of ships, airplane and helicopter overflights, diversion of what, 10 satellites? That starts to make the $100k look like savings.
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Part of these resources are being provided by people or organizations or governments who just want to Do The Right Thing.
Some more of these resources are being provided by those who see others Doing The Right Thing and thinking to themselves that "gee, if A can do it I should do it to show I'm just as good at DTRT as them".
And the last little bit are doing it for a positive karma, so they can get away with Something Bad later on...
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Part of these resources are being provided by people or organizations or governments who just want to Do The Right Thing.
Some more of these resources are being provided by those who see others Doing The Right Thing and thinking to themselves that "gee, if A can do it I should do it to show I'm just as good at DTRT as them".
And the last little bit are doing it for a positive karma, so they can get away with Something Bad later on...
A positive motivation for "doing the right thing" is the fact that these military crews have to stay proficient at their job. These emergency situations give them practice for the real world without having the dull feeling of a drill. Not to mention the fact that they would have spent the money flying those helicopters, planes, and sailing those ships regardless. The real question of cost is whether they were diverted from another mission of value, or whether they were just sitting in the south China sea
Higher prices (Score:2)
Knowing the airlines it would somehow be permanently added to the plane ticket price....
Given the number of unrecovered flight recorders [wikipedia.org] and the amount of time that list has been growing and the risks of being involved in a plane crash vs a car crash(no black box) [usatoday.com]
Since prices are already seem pretty high for me for those cramped seats, I think I side with "the industry" on this one.
Re:Higher prices (Score:4, Insightful)
The number of unrecovered black boxes is pretty damn low: in the past 25 years, only one airplane's recorders were lost. The rest were either destroyed in the crash, or deliberately not recovered.
Misunderstanding of risk (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Oy gevalt! This again? When minimizing risk, you have to invest where you get the best returns in lives saved. Obviously, in retrospect, after an accident, you'll wish you had spent infinity on having more safety, but that's the wrong way to think about it.
You should instead:
1) figure out how much you're willing to spend per statistical life saved
2) deploy safety measures up to that point
It's not always going to make sense to keep throwing on all kinds of safety equipment simply to handle every black swan event you can think of -- remember, they do log airplane location remotely and continuously; it's just that that still wasn't enough in this case.
You might as well advocate that planes start giving everyone a parachute, without realizing it makes flight so unaffordable as to push people to less safe modes of transportation.
Comments like these promote a worse understanding of the issues.
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I came here to harp on the same things as many other posters have already said. DriedClexler says it best so far.
There are at minimum 20k planes [airliners.net], but possibly up to 100k. Let's estimate that half of 20k planes have this installed, at an expenditure of one trillion dollars.
This would result in this particular flight having a 50% chance of having a bit of extra information about where it crashed.
Sounds like a pretty expensive method for retrieving dead bodies. But then, I've always wanted to be buri
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There are at minimum 20k planes, but possibly up to 100k. Let's estimate that half of 20k planes have this installed, at an expenditure of one trillion dollars.
You're off by a factor of a thousand here -- 10k * $100k is $1 billion, not $1 trillion. According to the article, ongoing costs would be in the hundreds of millions per year per airline, so a rough order-of-magnitude estimate might be $1 billion per year.
Worth it? Maybe. I'd like to see some examples of where a system like this would have actually saved some lives first -- the article doesn't give any. After all, there's an awful lot of things you can do for $1 billion a year that are more likely to sa
Rollroyce (Score:2)
Rolls Royce does this with their engines. They get real time telemetry whenever the engine is running.
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The ACARS only transmits in bursts while the plane is in flight, usually when there's been a change to the engine settings or operating conditions. Data transmission to satellites necessary for trans-oceanic flights costs money on a per-packet basis so there's no continuous data streaming. I think they log more data and dump it at the end of the flight once the plane's on the ground.
It starts transmitting when something goes wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
This $100,000 gadget doesn't do continuous data transmission. It starts transmitting when something goes wrong, and that's it.
If something does go wrong and there's time for this thing to start transmitting, then wouldn't there also be time for the pilot (copilot, navigator, stewardess) to get on the radio and say "Hello, chaps on the ground. Something has gone wrong."
If it blows up in mid-air or something like that, you won't get anything more with this device than you get without it.
What do you gain for $100,000, then?
Actually, it doesn't (Score:2)
"It starts transmitting when something goes wrong"
In theory it might start transmitting when something goes wrong, but clearly things can "go wrong" that would also prevent the start of the transmission. For example, if a couple of hijackers steal a plane and fly it to Thailand, they will turn off the device around the same time that they turn off the transponder. And just diverting the plane to a different location isn't likely to be detected as "something going wrong" to start the data transmission a
$100 grand? Try $300 Million/yr (Score:5, Insightful)
The fine article states that L-3 (who has a bit of a conflict of interest) says that streaming all data real-time would cost $300M/yr. The mfr of the "glass box" says it wouldn't stream data until there was an anomalous event, and so it wouldn't cost nearly that much.
Who's right? Well, TFA states "Of course, that wouldn’t yield much information if a plane is blown out of the sky by a bomb, or suffers a sudden catastrophic structural failure at cruising altitude. But in those rare cases, conventional black boxes are really the only viable technology."
So you either stream data all the time, or you miss the really crazy disappearances. Which is exactly the ones you WANT this data from. So to the families of passengers of MH370 - we don't know where your plane is because we didn't spend billions of dollars to equip every plane and then spend an extra $300Million a year to run the system.
Oh, and since the transponder that relays back basic information failed on this flight, there's a chance that whatever took it out would have also taken out the full-data relay, and after spending all those billions of dollars we might *still* not be able to find it.
Subcontractor Application (Score:2)
I think I could just barely provide a water-tight homing beacon with redundant power sources at, say, a million a dozen.... which leaves room for campaign contributions to secure the contracts.
can it be disabled? (Score:2)
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Many aircraft of this class are equipped with an ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter). These are difficult, if not impossible to disable in flight, as they are mounted remotely from the cockpit and are self powered. They can fail under certain circumstances. They may not activate if the aircraft impacts the ground. Or if it sinks immediately, carrying the ELT down with it.
I am wondering about the current status of ELTs following the fire in a parked 787 caused by a wiring fault in one. Was there an order p
How would this have helped with MH370? (Score:5, Informative)
"Of course, that wouldn’t yield much information if a plane is blown out of the sky by a bomb, or suffers a sudden catastrophic structural failure at cruising altitude. But in those rare cases, conventional black boxes are really the only viable technology."
MH370 was sending data when it disappeared. The ADS-B data can be found on FlightRadar 24. Rolls Royce indicated that it was receiving ACARS data from the engines.
All of this stuff was either switched off or stopped working because of a sudden catastrophic failure.
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A few more good articles on the topic (Score:2)
Current:
* http://online.wsj.com/news/art... [wsj.com]
Older (after AirFrance disaster)
* http://www.spiegel.de/internat... [spiegel.de]
* http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07... [nytimes.com]
An appeal to emotion? (Score:2)
-1 Flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370.
-1 Flamebait
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Flamebait
Right, it's the sort of schmaltzy emotion-based argument I expect from some politician or tabloid rag. Timothy, I am disappoint.
$100,000? (Score:5, Insightful)
It shouldn't cost that much. Many planes already have data service (run thru satellites) that they sell to passengers. Shouldn't be that hard to tap into the available instrument data and send out a blurp every 10-15 seconds. Doesn't even need fancy 2-way handshaking. Just send the encrypted packets and grab them as they arrive at the NOC. Not a big deal if the occasional blurp gets missed. But, if they never get another blurp from a plane, at least they got the data right up to the point of disaster.
Just 100K? don't believe it. (Score:5, Funny)
Cost per use (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, according to the FAA there's ~3,739 U.S. registered passenger jets which carry more than 90 passengers (http://atwonline.com/aircraft-amp-engines/faa-us-commercial-aircraft-fleet-shrank-2011). Cost to fit just U.S. registered aircraft with this device would therefore be just under $374 million.
Number of U.S. registered passenger jets which can carry > 90 passengers that have crashed with any fatalities since 2000 is maybe 5 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft#2000), and the number of those where it wasn't immediately obvious where the wreckage was was zero.
So in the US alone, we're talking close to $374 million dollars to fit out just aircraft that carry more than 90 people, for a return of nothing. I couldn't find a reliable estimate of the number of commercial passenger aircraft currently flying and capable of carrying > 90 passengers globally, but I did see a number of guestimates in the 15,000-20,000 range. Assuming there's only 10,000 currently active passenger planes in the world capable of carrying >90, that's $1,000,000,000 to fit them with this gadget. The number of planes since 2000 which went down with passengers on board which couldn't be immediately located is what? Two? The Malaysian Airlines one now and the Air France one a few years back?
So if every passenger plane in the world capable of carrying more than 90 people had been fitted with this gadget since 2000 we'd currently be running at half a billion dollars per actual use. I can think of a *lot* of uses for half a billion dollars which would actually save tens of thousands of lives. There isn't a single case in the last 20 years where this gadget would have saved a single life - all it can do, at best, is provide slightly faster confirmation to grieving families that their loved ones were indeed dead and here's how it happened. Which is not trivial - I don't mean to invalidate what such news might mean to someone with a loved one who was on that flight - but oh, my, that's a staggering bill to just provide speedy confirmation of a loved one's death for a few hundred people.
Let's NOT tell that to the families (Score:3)
"Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370"....
Would this device have stopped the plane from crashing? No. It would have told us what happened... So, in other words, it wouldn't have helped at all. We'd still be telling the families that their loved ones died. We'd just be able to tell them what happened. Which we'll be able to do once we recover the plane (and we will, be patient, sheesh) and find the black box.
In other words, this device does nothing that we need. It just tells what happend in time for the news cycle to remember there was this plane crash.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it would not transmit more than the flight data recorders. Those things store everything.
If there's something they don't store, it's added so they do.
To maintain a bitstream of sufficient width and density to share what the FDRs do for an
entire flight is beyond our available satellite uplink capacity even if cost were no factor.
Which it is.
At the end of all this the expenditure would save zero lives. It would prevent zero crashes.
It would just make investigations go quicker.
E
This is a stupid argument. (Score:2)
"It can be fitted to a commercial airliner for less than $100,000. But the industry has decided that it's not worth the expense. Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370."
Commercial airplane crashes are extremely rare. Even in these rare instances, it is even more rare not to find the aircraft that crashed.
It's NOT worth the extra expense. Should we really believe that *anything* is worth doing at *any* cost if it saves *any* lives? I would say no. But you don't have to take my word for it. People risk their own lives everyday to save money. It doesn't take a big greedy corporation to do it. If you offered people the option to pay $100 extra for their plane ticket so
$100,000? Try $0 and some competence. (Score:2)
"We're tracking every flying object in the sky." -- Bullshit. I guess that was just grandstanding from NORAD [wikipedia.org] and also demonstrates the futility of the NRO. [nro.gov] How many billions have Americans alone spent to ensure this can never happen already? I mean, was every bit of that post 9/11 "security" just posturing and scaremongering?
Egg meet face, world. If you ask me, having a large passenger jet disappear in mid air just goes to show how much we've squandered in the guise of security when without actually get
Except that (Score:3)
Hey EvidenceBase, did you even read your article? (Score:2)
article admits in cases when plane suddenly crashes the system is useless, the black box is only useful source of data
reality is a system such as Next Gen that would have sufficient satellite coverage and bandwidth will cost billions and take years to implement (including launching satellites). that's the only way the tens of thousands of daily flights could have their data recorded.
So we'll tell the families of the presumed dead of the Malaysian airlines flights not to listen to technically ignorant assho
Installed on new-build planes? (Score:2)
I wonder is this device being installed on new-build airliners? A large, well-funded airline like Emirates would certainly want it installed on their large A380 and 777 fleet, especially given the distance of many flights out of Dubai.
Dear families of passengers on Flight MH370: (Score:2)
It would be nice to know where the plane is and why. However, crashes happen so infrequently
that spending billions of dollars and not preventing a single one -- merely accelerating the speed
at which we get the "black box" data is not worth it.
Everyone involved including the airline industry has decided that it's not worth the expense
to spend $100,000 per airplane as well as untold costs to maintain that, and pass the costs
onto your relatives.
Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370.
I just did.
E
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, and that was the conclusion in the article as well. Planes simply don't kill enough people to justify the added expense. That said, we could avoid situations like these by simply supplementing the black box with some low-tech options that are available for cheap. For instance, send the location, heading, speed, and altitude back to the ground each minute. Over the course of an hour, that should take up less than a megabyte of bandwidth, keeping data costs over the satellite low, and it'd help search pa
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the time, when a plane goes down we know where it went.
And since we don't know why or how this plane went down surely we don't really know whether some fancy new system would have helped or not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Dumb author... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
A quick google search says a cheap satellite is $300 million. I'm not sure how many we would need, but it would not be a small number.
Nah. A cheap satellite is £50k, maybe £80k including deployment into orbit.
For $300m you can build a fucking big, fucking complex satellite and it's fucking expensive.
Re: (Score:3)
Two aircraft flying in V formation are more efficient than two aircraft flying 500 metres apart side-by-side.
One larger aircraft is more efficient than two aircraft.
But feel free to construct a model, build a wind tunnel and do some testing - if you're right, there's an entire industry interested in buying your idea from you.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Fuck slashdot and their Slashvertisements. Head over to AltSlashdot.org [altslashdot.org]
You're complaining about advertising and giving your own advertisement. Irony meter pegged at 11.