
Air France flight data recorder recovered - colinprince
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13255673
======
jerrya
I understand why in a world of easily destructible tape memory, there was only
one, non-replicated flight data recorder memory. And it must've been quite
heavy.

I don't understand now why in an aircraft strewn with various datalinks, there
aren't a dozens or more inexpensive, lightweight easily findable flashdrives
as datarecorders. You could place these at the wingtips, in the tail, in the
landing gear, in all sorts of places that are known to survive.

~~~
shin_lao
I wonder if your inexpensive flash drive operates at - 60 °C...

~~~
rdtsc
Wait, you actually thought he meant going to Wal-Mart and buying 1GB flash
drives?

Somehow I doubt that is what the poster meant and you are just building a
straw-man argument to gain points.

Insulating, heating and protecting against shock should not be harder for a
flash drive than insulating, heating and protecting against impact of a tape
drive with lot of moving parts inside.

~~~
markfenton
More practically, I suspect the problem is the amount of time and energy taken
to prove and certify a new way of doing things. Flight data recorders are
standardised across most of the world and I suspect agreeing and certifing the
number/location/design is more difficult than actually changing the hardware.

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ronnier
It is unbelievable that it was found and that the search never ended. You can
watch a video about this flight on PBS:
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html>

~~~
palish
"French search teams last week found the outer casing of the so-called black
box recorder, but _not its memory_."

(EDIT: This is incorrect, sorry. The article is poorly worded. Would you
rather I delete this comment?)

~~~
whakojacko
...And they just found the memory unit (which is designed to detach from the
recorder in the event of a collision) today. A picture of the actual memory
unit in question:
[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/01/world/europe/01...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/01/world/europe/01airfrance.html)

~~~
palish
Ahhh. Thank you for clarifying the article. That's amazing!

~~~
wazoox
Indeed. Looking for the proverbial needle in a huge haystack is a piece of
cake compared to what was done there.

IIRC, they actually had some very low level signal from the recorders two
years ago that they didn't actually take notice of, and later, working on this
data they finally extrapolated the probable position of the wreck after a
tremendous data mining work.

~~~
palish
Whoa. If you can find any links whatsoever about that, then I'd love to read
them.

That reminds me of how Gauss was able to use very limited information to
locate Ceres after it had moved behind the sun.

~~~
com
It's been quite hard to find information about the re-analysis. It looks like
there was a press-release in May last year where the pingers were identified
after a re-analysis of the Emeraude towed-array sonar tapes:

[http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/air-france-
crash...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/air-france-crash-probe-
gets-boost-as-signal-detected-update1-.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/europe/07crash.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/europe/07crash.html?partner=rss&emc=rss)

Sadly, there are no references to source material, and a quick search through
the BEA at <http://www.bea.aero/> (the French aviation accident investigation
agency) didn't provide immediate satisfaction, alas.

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patrickod
Does the article say that they found the cover of the second recorder but the
data on the 1st? Thought the wording was ever so slightly ambiguous

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jamesbritt
See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2503677>

