
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes - timw6n
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-black-box
======
brandon272
I'm seeing a lot of armchair criticism aimed at the air travel industry about
how these aircraft should be able to be tracked more effectively given "modern
technology" and they reference things like broadband in cars, WiFi on flights,
etc.

What they seem to ignore is that many of these things only work effectively on
land in populated areas. Drive your car out to the South China Sea and let me
know how well the in-car broadband works and if you are able to send and
receive an SMS using your phone.

There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars
but not a commercial airliner on Earth. Our ability to track something is a
lot easier when things are going right. When something catastrophic happens,
whether to a 777 out over the ocean or a rover on Mars, suddenly tracking the
objects becomes a lot more difficult.

That said, perhaps there are technological innovations that could allow us to
more easily pinpoint and track black boxes from downed airliners. I'm just not
sure what they are. Any ideas?

~~~
kevingadd
Aren't satellites an obvious choice for this sort of thing? The link doesn't
need to have the kind of low ping you expect for online games, and for low-
latency communication they can use radio/radar - but that seems like it would
have enough bandwidth for black-box style data, wouldn't it? Or does satellite
communication generally suffer from problems with cloud cover, etc, even at
the altitudes commercial airliners fly at?

Though, once the black box is in the ocean with the rest of a plane's
wreckage, I can't imagine satellites would help :)

~~~
objclxt
I pointed this out somewhere else, but satellites aren't particularly helpful
because you won't be able to transmit to them _when you most need it_ , which
is when there are problems with the plane. It's still highly likely that
you're still going to end up with planes going 'off the grid' so to speak.

You could lose power, stopping you from transmitting telemetric data. Or there
could be a cabin depressurization or breach that cuts off the antennas (or
destroys them entirely). I'm not denying there are benefits to streaming
telemetric and flight data continuously for non-major mechanical failures and
general analysis - but when we're talking about a catastrophic event that
brings down a plane?

In such an event you're going to be sending people to look for the wreckage
anyway. Whatever data you're streaming isn't going to tell you the whole story
- it'll end up looking exactly like the data does today: perfectly normal, and
then nothing. I can see that in a 24 hour news cycle people want to know what
happened when it happened. It perhaps understandably freaks people out to
learn planes can just 'disappear' without explanation. But streaming
telemetric data isn't going to help with that, because the only way we can
stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area)
is with satellites, and they're simply not reliable enough for it to be worth
anything.

~~~
m4x
Real time telemetry via satellite could definitely be useful in some
situations. The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the
ground had taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior
pilot has been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it. That
was one of the worst crashes in history and there was never even a problem
with the plane. All they needed to save the flight was for somebody to point
out that the plane was stalling due to a bad control input by one of the
pilots.

There are certainly cases where the telemetry link would fail as the aircraft
ran into trouble, rendering it useless, but there are undeniably cases where
it could save hundreds of lives

~~~
tzs
> The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had
> taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has
> been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it

There are something like 10k commercial flights in the air at a given time
around the world. How would that somebody on the ground know to look at that
particular plane's telemetry?

~~~
jarek
This is the least difficult part of the whole scheme. A program looking at all
incoming data and picking out extraordinary data (in AF 447's case, for
instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human operator to inspect would
help greatly. There'd be a lot of false alarms but still vastly less work than
looking at telemetry of every plane ever. (And even if - 10k is around the
number of employees of one mid-size airport - hardly undoable if you wanted.)

~~~
ekianjo
> A program looking at all incoming data and picking out extraordinary data
> (in AF 447's case, for instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human
> operator to inspect would help greatly.

Look at what happened in flight AF447. Everything occurred in a matter of
minutes. Even if what you mentioned were to be in place, there would be
virtually no time for an operator to do anything about it. And probably such
operators would have to go through textbook questions because such regulations
would be imposed on them by the FAA.

That's why we have several pilots in every aircraft, to mitigate the risk of
human failure. Having more operators outside of the plane are not going to
help much. If you want to put more engineering power, it's more software in
the plane that is the right way to go for safety, as demonstrated so many
times before.

------
akiselev
I totally agree with making black boxes more advanced to phone home and such,
but this line annoyed me:

"Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the
cockpit. Simple changes could mean faster answers for plane crashes"

You're talking about the _black box_ for a airline jet. This thing is supposed
to survive plane crashes; not just being dropped a meter off the floor, but
smashing into the ground going _100 's of meters per second_. The design
constraints in those conditions include, assuming the plane is now a ballistic
fire ball smashing into the ocean: operating temperature well above even
industrial components to survive the fire, mechanical strength to withstand
hundreds if not thousands of g's during impact (at this speed the ocean is the
same as solid rock), and then float in the freezing ocean for days if not
weeks until it is recovered. I'm not sure if black boxes are guaranteed to
float or not, but if they are designed to sink, they must then withstand tens
of atmospheres extra pressure for a sustained period of time.

The secret is that smartphone processors have been more powerful than safety
critical processors since their inception with the IBM Simon [1]. The RAD750
[2], NASA's _only_ "current generation" processor, began to fly in 2005 with a
whopping single core with a 110Mhz core clock and an older manufacturing
process than that of processors used for early 2000's era smart phones. When
technology is moving so fast that Intel is building a new multi-billion dollar
factory every few years, safety critical device designers don't give a shit
about how fast they are. They care that they can get a level of confidence in
the stability and reliability of the processor, that it has _years_ of data on
life time, and then that it can be manufactured by an array of suppliers. That
cannot be guaranteed by cutting edge technology, no matter how many bits or
fancy virtualization features you throw at it. For the black box, this means
_every_ component in the design must survive and _operate_ (an IC can survive
the hundreds of deg C in a reflow oven but it sure as hell won't work if you
send current through it) at or close to those conditions.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Replacing black boxes is not a good idea. Black boxes work when everything
else has broken. We trust them to report when unimaginable edge conditions are
breached.

We should instead _supplement_ our sturdy but silent black boxes with a
chattier partner. The new device would not survive a catastrophic breakup. Nor
would it receive the omniscient breadth of data trusted to a black box.
Instead, it would (1) receive a subset of flight data (e.g. location, alerts,
and pilot inputs) and (2) immediately send them to a ground-based datacentre.
These data would back up air traffic controllers' radars in real time. They
would also assist in locating fallen planes and their more comprehensive black
boxes.

~~~
lgeek
> We should instead supplement our sturdy but silent black boxes with a
> chattier partner. The new device would not survive a catastrophic breakup.
> Nor would it receive the omniscient breadth of data trusted to a black box.
> Instead, it would (1) receive a subset of flight data (e.g. location,
> alerts, and pilot inputs) and (2) immediately send them to a ground-based
> datacentre. These data would back up air traffic controllers' radars in real
> time.

It seems to me you've described ADS-B[0], which this plane had and which will
become a requirement in US and EU soon. Looking at sites like
flightradar24.com, which use ADS-B data, it would seem most airliners already
use it. The only difference from your requirements is that ADS-B doesn't
broadcast any information about pilot inputs.

According to records from one of the sites which use ADS-B, the signal from
this plane just stopped [1]. This could have happened because of a severe
failure in flight, or maybe because the plane descended below cruising
altitude which happened to take it out of receiver range. In either case, it
shows that the proposed scheme would be of limited use and it might not have
helped in this particular case.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-
broadcast)

[1] I'll search for the source when I get back to my computer. It was
discussed in /r/aviation.

~~~
masklinn
What he's describing is closer to ACARS, which already exists but has very low
bandwidth.

------
richardwhiuk
I love how the article compares a black box to an iPhone.

A flight data recorder is one of the worlds most indestructible pieces of
technology, whose main function still works having been smashed into the land,
undergone a fireball, or dropped to the bottom of the sea.

An iPhone breaks when you drop it from three feet and becomes little more than
an expensive piece of junk (as do all modern, touchscreen smartphones).

Good luck getting a satellite or cell signal a few fathoms under the sea, near
no cell towers.

~~~
cpncrunch
I agree. The fact that they pulled a black box up from the bottom of the
Atlantic after sitting on the bottom of the ocean for two years show how
durable those things are.

------
mbell
This plane, like most other commercial jets, already had ADS-B onboard which
transmits quite a bit of flight data. This is where most of the data on
flightradar24.com comes from. In the case of the Air France flight it was way
out in the ocean away from ADS-B receivers. There is already a plan to include
ADS-B receivers on more satellites to help the ocean coverage problem.

None of this solves the issue of sorting out what happened during a
catastrophic failure. It's likely any transmission based system will fail is
such situations. The only reliable way to have real time information is to use
external sources, e.g. high resolution radar covering every point on Earth,
that isn't cheap nor politically easy.

~~~
crazytony
Agreed. And ADS is mandated in commercial aircraft. It's part of the system
that prevents aircraft from colliding with each other in the air (TCAS/ACAS).

But as I understand in this situation they were not out of ADS-B range nor
were they out of radar range. While ADS-B requires the aircraft to transmit,
radar does not.

An example of an in-flight breakup happened in 2002 when China Airlines 611
which broke into 4 pieces about 40km off of an island. Looking at the radar
returns they found the aircraft broke into 4 large chunks and they were able
to tell where items would be due to the radar tracks.

I'm really not sure what's happened here but my hunch is that the incident
happened at the boundary of one or more countries' radar systems. So Malaysia
needs Vietnam and/or Thailand and/or Cambodia and/or China to turn over their
radar returns so that everything can be lined up correctly.

If it was all within one radar system you would have a location pinpointed
within an hour.

------
curtis
I think one of the lessons of Air France 447 is that our existing black boxes
not only work, they work extremely well. So it's not so much that we want to
replace our current black box technology so much as we want to augment it. A
live satellite feed is an obvious choice here, but I'd argue that a secondary
backup black-box (presumably 100% solid state these days) located in a part of
the airplane that's likely to float would be a good idea.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Is there any part of a plane likely to float with a black box attached to it?
I can't find data on Google, but I'd guess they're pretty heavy?

~~~
curtis
There were certainly parts of Air France 447 that floated. I think the largest
piece may have been a section of tail. I don't know if there are parts that
reliably float in the case of an accident over water but I'd guess that tail
sections and winglets are good candidates.

~~~
mcintyre1994
I was thinking about the added weight of a black box though. My possibly naive
assumption is that they're heavy because they're so robust, so would need
serious buoyancy. I can't find a weight for them though so I might be wrong.

~~~
curtis
That may be true of existing black boxes, but a purpose-designed solid-state
black box wouldn't have to be very big. Especially if it was optimized for
surviving impact with water rather than, for example, a mountain.

In fact, I was just thinking about how you could probably put a miniature
blackbox in every single airline seat. Airline seats are already designed to
float, and you'd only need one of them to be recoverable. Such a black box
might not be capable of storing everything traditional black boxes do, but if
it managed to capture a last moment GPS position it might make it much easier
to find the regular black box.

~~~
TylerE
> Especially if it was optimized for surviving impact with water rather than,
> for example, a mountain.

I think that's a distinction without difference. At 500mph, the water might as
well be rock.

~~~
curtis
I'm not at all certain that's true at the extremes for which black boxes are
designed. A difference between thousands of Gs and tens-of-thousands of Gs
wouldn't matter for the airplane fuselage, but it might matter for solid-state
electronics. I don't know if you'd get that kind of force differential between
a water impact and say, slamming into a solid granite wall. But I'm to ready
to discount it.

But even if we assume that there really isn't a meaningful difference in the
physics of a ground vs. water impact, I think there still might be an
advantage to having your conventional black box optimized for maximum
survivability and having an auxiliary black box which sacrifices some degree
of survivability at the extremes in exchange for improved discoverability
after an accident.

------
yaakov34
Let's start estimating the technical challenge here (we're supposed to be
techies, after all).

Bandwidth: quick googling shows that a flight data recorder records between 64
and 256 12-bit words a second, i.e. 1-3 kbps. Browsing
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate)
shows that another 2-8 kbps is needed for voice recording (from one
microphone). Let's call it 10 kpbs all together.

Number of simultaneous connections: there are around 20,000 (ballpark)
airliners in the air at the peak time each day.

Compare this to the rather old Iridium satellite network: 2400 (uplink) baud
rate, 1100 calls simultaneously per satellite (of which there are 68). Not
quite enough, since airplanes are not evenly distributed over the Earth or
under the satellites, but not outrageously far from our requirements.

Cost: several billion dollars (under 10, I think) have been invested into
building the Iridium network, and their operating expenses are around 100
million per year (they are a public company).

Clearly, it would not be unrealistically expensive, in the world of 500
million dollar airliners, to build and maintain a network of satellites to
record all black-box voice and data in real time.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Why use satellites? There is plenty of long-range terrestrial radio tech that
could do the job. Land-based and or even cargo ship based listening posts
would be much cheaper. Aircraft-to-aircraft comms could also potentially do
the job.

Granted, aircraft fly high in the air, but there are no line-of-sight problems
as with terrestrial radio links, so even high frequency comms are possible.

~~~
wglb
Keep in mind that over-the-horizon radio communication is subject to the
vagaries of the ionosphere and is not totally reliable. Further, there is a
day/night difference, and a dependence on latitude. Line of sight at 30000
feet is about 200 miles, so there are huge areas where everything is over your
horizon.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
But don't _most_ actual aircraft flight paths tend to stay near land? For
those flights that must go over that horizon, couldn't they fail over to a
lower freq / lower bandwidth channel, when needed; while still keeping near
real-time status updates?

Or connect via another aircraft who is further behind them but on a similar
flight plan.

Here is probably one of the worst flight paths for this type of potential
comms
[http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL888/history/20140310/0...](http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL888/history/20140310/0540Z/ZBAA/KSFO)

I had intended to use that to support my notion that aircraft tend to stay
near land. I've flown that route several times and each time we flew an arc
that kept us near or overland. Like this, but never in Russian airspace.
[http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CCA985/history/20140309/0...](http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CCA985/history/20140309/0800Z/ZBAA/KSFO)

Man, these guys are all over the place. I may have to reform my ideas about
flight paths.

~~~
wglb
Well, for the ones that travel within sight of land, we don't have much of a
problem. And that may be "most". But "most" flights don't end in disaster. It
is the ones that spend long hours over the horizon that are of the most
concern.

A significant number spend lots of time more than 200 miles from land. And
"land" here means some land with a data link endpoint.

With respect to airplanes forming some sort of mesh network, consider the
bandwidth requirements throughout this link.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>With respect to airplanes forming some sort of mesh network, consider the
bandwidth requirements throughout this link.

Right, but all that is really necessary is groundspeed, altitude, and
equipment number. That gets you enough information to find a crash / forced
landing site quickly, and to know where to search for wreckage. So, even for
those parts of the flight path that are "dark" It still may be potentially
superior to low-bandwidth satellite links.

------
dap
What's the actual problem here? How many fatal crashes of commercial airliners
with black boxes have ultimately not been root-caused? I don't think it's very
many. Is the problem that it doesn't happen quickly enough? Is the fear that
another plane might crash for the same cause while people are still
investigating the first one? I'm not sure this is based on anything rational.

~~~
yeukhon
_How many fatal crashes of commercial airliners with black boxes have
ultimately not been root-caused?_

I am not sure what you are trying to say.

The blackbox is like your log file on a server: _the flight recorders (flight
data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) in aircraft,_ (wiki). So if you want
to know what happened to the aircraft, whether after a fatal crash or after a
hijack or after emergency landing, the blackbox is ultimately the best source.
Don't forget there is a legal responsibility.

It is totally rational.

~~~
dap
I'm saying that if black boxes are sufficient to root-cause the vast majority
of commercial airline crashes, what problem are we trying to solve by
"rethinking" them? The only one I can think of is speeding up the process, but
it's not clear that that's _actually_ a real problem rather than just
disappointing to someone in the news industry who wants answers within a few
news cycles.

~~~
jusben1369
Yes I think you're on to something. The complaint is how long it takes to have
a definitive answer. But I'm not sure how significant a problem that is. For
relatives and friends it may create a little closure but probably not much
given it doesn't change the main issue. It's _possible_ that there could be
data collected that, if modified on other planes, would reduce or remove the
chance of a similar tragedy. It doesn't seem though like that is the case in
any disaster to this point.

------
WalterBright
I'd also like to see, along with the cockpit voice data recorder, a video
recorder of the last n minutes of the cockpit. Much accident investigation
revolves around trying to reconstruct what the pilot was doing, looking at,
etc. This would make it much simpler and more accurate.

~~~
Zancarius
I was hoping you'd chime in on one of these discussions, given your history in
the aircraft industry.

What are your thoughts on the rather knee-jerk articles as of late that seem
to think that some form of streaming technology is somehow absolutely
imperative, and how might that compare to the tried-and-tested flight
recorders given what we know from AF447 sharing periodic updates as to its
status?

~~~
WalterBright
My knowledge of what is and isn't practical with streaming technology isn't
much better than that of a layperson.

I do find the aviation industry to be sometimes peculiarly behind the times.
For example, a few years ago, I wondered online why airports did not have
constant video recording of the runway and taxiways. Such would have been
enormously helpful in solving many accidents, such as the SST crash.

But an airline pilot argued with me, saying that such would be cost
prohibitive and thoroughly impractical. I was baffled by such statements,
given that every 7-11 had constant video surveillance.

I do follow air crashes and the subsequent investigations, the engineer in me
just cannot resist. The investigations are so thorough these days that it's
pretty rare that the cause and chain of events are not thoroughly understood.
The only issue is sometimes it takes years, which can get pretty frustrating
for people (including me) who like instant answers. The mitigating factor is
accidents are now extremely rare. I don't think that the cost of a live
streaming system is clearly worth it.

The black box system has turned out to be probably the biggest single factor
in improving safety ever devised. They work great, and the aviation industry
is (naturally) very conservative about changing things that work.

~~~
WalterBright
A lot of accidents happen on the runway or shortly after. Video will tell a
lot of things that telemetry won't - visibility, runway incursions, just where
the airplane lifted off, ice on the wings, fire or smoke, any missing parts
(!), open doors, working lights, bird strikes, etc. It can also be a backup if
the telemetry is lost, such as speed, position of the flaps, problems with the
landing gear, etc.

------
rjzzleep
what yakov says isn't fully accurate. there are 4 voice channels that sum up
to around 50kbit. and the fdr recording data is specified at around 12kbit.
check the bea working group document

ironically part of my master thesis is about blackboxes and satellites.
iridium has been working with some company about the topic(i think, i wish i
remembered the details, but you can just google them). but generally iridium
is slow right now(that might change but when i say slow i mean less than 4kbit
slow), and i think the main reason why it's still there is because it covers
the poles.

rolls royce actually already deployed a thing that transfers data through
satellites, so you can actually get live engine data. this is almost ironic
since their engines seem to be so crappy that a significant portion of them
requires replacement according to qantas.

inmarsat on the other hand is much faster. you have to consider though, in a
lot of regions you have way more planes than you have bandwidth. also inmarsat
is already heavily used by ships(which from what i heard have a lot of virus
infested windows pc's sending bogus junk). there is no way

the main issue is that we can easily have way more planes than we have
bandwidth per spot beam

[]
[http://www.bea.aero/en/enquetes/flight.af.447/flight.data.re...](http://www.bea.aero/en/enquetes/flight.af.447/flight.data.recovery.working.group.final.report.pdf)

[]
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10146289/Rolls-
Royce-regrets-A380-engine-explosion.html)

[] [http://www.rolls-
royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/mon...](http://www.rolls-
royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/monitoring_systems.jsp)

[] [http://www.inmarsat.com/about-us/our-
satellites/](http://www.inmarsat.com/about-us/our-satellites/)

------
confluence
We really don't. Satellite uplinks don't have enough bandwith for every
plane's black box data, and the data we would get wouldn't be useful, since
you need the data when things go wrong, and I doubt you'll maintain a
connection when everything goes wrong. Furthermore this article illustrates
why I try not to read the news at all. The journalist has absolutely no idea
what he's talking about - which is the norm for most stories. Film streaming
is done from an on plane cache and in air WiFi is more often than not provided
by ground cellular networks, falling back to satellite, which is unusable most
of the time.

------
joering2
The issue here is a monetary one.

How many planes go down each year? A few. How many planes are never found
(black boxes). One per 10-15 years?

An airline, or a company that builds planes would have little to none problem
explaining to the judge that benefit-cost analyse make no sense: too much
money would be spent for too little benefit (I know lives may be at stake, but
that won't convince the judge).

Couple years ago I read an interesting article about the way Boeing builds
their wings and the way petrol compartments are organized inside such a wing.
It went on to explain that in particular external conditions of air, at
particular speeds, with particular climbing angle and with particular
temperature of aircraft coat, there is a chance of petrol ignition. The only
"problem" is that according to their calculation, the probability of all
conditions being right is 1:17,000,000. While re-engineering the wing and then
applying changes to each aircraft would go north of a billion dollars.
Therefore, they have not upgraded their aircrafts and no authority went after
them surely because of tiny chance of an accident occurring.

We are all flying a ticking time bomb to some extent. The chances of something
going wrong are comparable to putting a parrot before your keyboard. How much
time will it take a parrot to hit a combination of keys writing "parrot". It
may be one billion years! Or five minutes...

~~~
ghshephard
"I know lives may be at stake"

What lives are at stake? An enhanced black box won't prevent accidents, and,
with very few exceptions, it won't help us find out the cause of accidents. I
think your take on the "cost-benefit" analysis made the most sense.

Your 1 in 17 million scenario is interesting - how many times per flight is
that scenario evaluated, or is that per flight? If per flight, and suppose we
have about 20,000 Boeing flights a day, then we would have a Boeing explosion
every 3 years. (Adjust the numbers based on how many Boeing flights there are)
- I would say it's worthwhile making the change there.

~~~
selectodude
I think the chances that the conditions are right are 1 in 17 million, however
the chances the fuel ignites is also extremely low.

------
aaronbrethorst
"Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the
cockpit."

My iPhone 5s is arguably "more powerful" than the Hasselblad 501cm[1] I
currently have sitting next to me. The iPhone has a built-in light meter,
flash, and GPS. It can take more than 12 photos without reloading.

But, the Hasselblad was designed to satisfy a different set of criteria than
the iPhone. And, for those criteria, it's absolutely perfect. If I want to
Instagram something I'll use my iPhone[2]. If I want to shoot a photo I can
print at sizes measured in _feet_ , I'll use my Hasselblad.

Is it possible that the airplane black box needs a 21st century rethink? Sure.
But to dismiss it in the article subhead does a disservice to everyone who
reads the article.

[1] not my blog and not my photos, but representative of the camera:
[http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/07/27/fd-shooting-with-the-
le...](http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/07/27/fd-shooting-with-the-legends-
hasselblad-501cm/)

[2] Actually, I'm one of those people who only uploads photos taken with a
'real' camera to Instagram, but you get the idea.

------
austinz
Certainly, at least for those planes fitted with satellite Internet uplinks, a
status report every two minutes or so would be technically feasible and not
terribly expensive?

~~~
curtis
Air France 447 actually had such a system, although it was not designed to
fulfill the same role as the black box.

Here's Wikipedia on the subject
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Automated...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Automated_messages)):

An Air France spokesperson stated on 3 June that "the aircraft sent a series
of electronic messages over a three-minute period, which represented about a
minute of information. "[32][33][Note 2] These messages, sent from an onboard
monitoring system via the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting
System (ACARS), were made public on 4 June 2009.[34] The transcripts indicate
that between 02:10 UTC and 02:14 UTC, 6 failure reports (FLR) and 19 warnings
(WRN) were transmitted.[35] The messages resulted from equipment failure data,
captured by a built-in system for testing and reporting, and cockpit warnings
also posted to ACARS.[36] The failures and warnings in the 4 minutes of
transmission concerned navigation, auto-flight, flight controls and cabin air-
conditioning (codes beginning with 34, 22, 27 and 21, respectively).[37]

~~~
austinz
Interesting. From the linked article, it looks like coordinate data was
transmitted as well as telemetry. Given the high speed of airliners, ocean
currents, and travel time for rescue ships, even minute-by-minute
transmissions wouldn't solve the problem of pinpointing the exact location of
wreckage/survivors.

~~~
curtis
In the case of AF447 the flight control system knew something was wrong. In a
situation like that increasing the rate of messaging automatically might be a
good idea, and could probably be implemented entirely in software. It probably
wouldn't help in the case of catastrophic air frame failure out altitude
however.

------
jtchang
While the author may me making some technological comparisons that need a bit
of vetting the basis premise is good.

Given how much these planes cost it does seem reasonable to have real time
telemetry. Yes it is hard. Yes it is expensive. But no where do I read it
can't be done. In fact I think a lot of technological innovation has been
driven by people saying "Nope...you can't do that.".

Where is the incentive to provide real time telemetry? More crashes? This is
one place where I feel the FAA does have quite a bit of responsibility.

------
hippoman
Whenever there's a big disaster, people want to find technical solutions. But
the real problem is not even plane crashes at all. It's car crashes, heart
attacks, suicides, murders, and other preventable disasters that aren't so
newsworthy but can still be helped. We all know air travel is much safer than
walking or driving and also expensive, partly to pay for that extreme safety.
Adding more expense to make such a safe thing even safer is wasting money.

------
MISTERSASB
Great discussion. I now understand more about the objections to replacing a
black box with satellite streaming data . The two major objections seem to be
1) a catastrophic event could bring external communications to an immediate
end and 2) the high data density could make it impractical to link it all to a
satellite.

As to the first objection, any catastrophe would be preceded by the cause of
the catastrophe. This is what one would hope to capture. I'm not sure if that
covers every possible case but I it could be of great value to have instant
access to events just prior. As to the second objection, intelligent systems
can make useful decisions about which data to transmit and about how long a
burst of information should be sent.

Anything that can be done to reduce the time needed to locate passengers who
are injured or trying to survive on the ocean or in difficult conditions
deserves a look, in my opinon.

~~~
jarek
> it could be of great value to have instant access to events just prior.

Why is it a significantly larger value than having access at worst two years
later? No plane went down due to the same problem while they were looking for
the AF 447 black box.

> Anything that can be done to reduce the time needed to locate passengers who
> are injured or trying to survive on the ocean or in difficult conditions
> deserves a look, in my opinon.

Passengers might survive reasonably successful ditchings, after which
currently-fitted ELTs activate and transmit location as you expect. An event
that results in ELTs not activating is generally not survivable in the first
place.

~~~
Alphasite_
Well, for example if it was design issue they could pull all effected aircraft
immediately, rate than waiting for the next one to crash over and and getting
the blackbox then.

~~~
jarek
In practice, that's just not an issue these days.

Most crashes are due to human error or complex system problems that often
include already known issues rather than a single thing failing
catastrophically. Airbus put out a maintenance bulletin about pitot tubes
freezing before AF 447 crash, and cockpit/crew management, concentration and
problem solving while startled, and computer mode confusion were all known.
The most recent example of one solid hardware problem are the 787 batteries
and thanks to QA systems we know they are problematic but, fingers crossed, so
far they haven't gotten bad enough to kill people. If a 787 goes down you know
this will be the first thing looked at even without instant access to logs.

A new airplane entering production with a flaw that will go unnoticed until it
suddenly starts crashing planes en masse is just incredibly unlikely. On
balance of probabilities, we're better off focusing on existing known problems
rather than coming up with super high tech monitoring schemes.

------
neurotech1
A combination of Enhanced Ground-Proximity Warning System (EGPWS)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_proximity_warning_system)
and Deployable Flight Incident Recorder Set (DFIRS)
[http://www.drs.com/Products/c3a/DFIRS.aspx](http://www.drs.com/Products/c3a/DFIRS.aspx)
might be an option. The DFIRS deploys when a pilot ejects from a F/A-18
Hornet. Using EGPWS in a civilian aircraft the system only triggers when a
crash is imminent.

An alternative would be to eject the DFIRS when subjected to high acceleration
like an Airbag in a car. In a large proportion of crashes, the nose of the jet
hits first.

------
ackydoodles
The black boxes are fine. ACARS/ADS-B are usually helpful, just not in this
case, so far as we know.

There is already a perfectly capable technology in place: the 406 MHz ELT. If
it turns out the the (probably two) ELTs did not transmit, we need to think
about why.

Things can go bad quickly on a commercial jet. No one has time to manually
activate the ELT before a sudden impact.

At least one of the ELTs is required to activate automatically in case of an
impact. A hard landing is enough.

So why did at least one of the ELTs not activate? here are some possibilities:

1) It did, and we don't know about it. The media is so ignorant about the
details of technological systems that they don't know the questions to ask,
cannot understand the relevance of technical details, and would not understand
the answers in any case. Welcome to the idiocracy.

2) An ELT activated, but was not picked up. Very unlikely. If an ELT activated
aboard MH370, the satellites would almost certainly have received the signal
and passed it on.

3) The aircraft hit the water intact, and the ELTs were destroyed before they
could activate.

We can't do anything about the stupidity of the media except to educate
ourselves, stop consuming media garbage, and hope that, eventually, the human
condition will improve.

If option (3) is correct, then we can also do nothing. Any force sufficient to
interfere with the safe operation of the aircraft by competent pilots should
also have been sufficient to activate an ELT.

If the ELT did not activate, it means that the aircraft was flyable. We cannot
adjust the sensitivity of the ELTs to activate on flyable aircraft, because
the rate of false activations would be unacceptable.

Apparently, we also cannot eliminate the impact of flyable aircraft with
terrain by pilot training; quite the contrary--the phenomenon seems to be
increasing.

Improved autopilots are also not the answer. Of necessity, an autopilot must
relinquish control to human pilots in many circumstances where anomalous data
is received. This is the circumstance in which it is most likely that the
human pilot, taking control of a partially disabled aircraft, often at night
and over water, will crash a flyable aircraft into terrain. There has been a
growing series of such accidents.

So, no, we do not need to rethink "black boxes". They do their job very well.
We also do not need to rethink the ELT--it is a very reliable technology
except when people crash a flyable aircraft.

We may want to continue to upgrade the packet data rate between the aircraft
and its base, but that is already the plan.

We also cannot upgrade the autopilot, because we cannot yet create artificial
intelligence that can deal with a chaotic system like a partially disabled
aircraft.

We may want to think about giving pilots better ways of seeing an overview of
their situation. Mandatory AOA indicators and external-view situation
indicators would be a great start.

Probably also rethinking reflexive media coverage of aviation would be good.
Our need to know immediately does not trump the well-thought-out engineering
of commercial airliners, and pandering to our self-absorbed search for meaning
and quick fixes, particularly when none is available, is likely degrade,
rather than improve, the human condition.

------
teamonkey
From what I understand, what makes this (probable) crash unusual is that
nothing was received from the plane. Modern airliners send out all sorts of
signals over several channels. The data that sites like FlightTracker uses are
part of it.

In the case of the Air France crash, telemetry data was sent out in the good
15 minutes it took to go down. With this flight - nothing. One moment it was
sending data saying all was well, the next it simply disappeared from the
screens. Extremely unusual. If there was a sudden disintegration of the
aircraft, there's a good chance an internet-based device would go offline too.

I believe the black box has a signal that will let it be found but it only has
a range of 1-2km - less underwater.

------
shirro
I don't know if this is practical or not. Have two or more compartments on a
plane filled with dozens of small highly reflective buoys. Each with some sort
of radar reflector, either passive or active, that searchers could light up
with radar and it would emit back a strong signal. In event of a breakup their
container is designed to scatter them everywhere or in a more controlled
situation the planes systems could release them. Ofcourse they will drift in
the air and in the ocean currents but you could analyse then statistically
along with knowledge of wind and ocean currents to at least narrow the search
area in a situation like this one.

------
rukball
The topic has been proposed periodically in the past
([http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-
black...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-
box/0)). There are already systems in the market.

What is perhaps more boggling is that you just need a last seen GPS coordinate
or set to help find the boxes and the plane - a GPS packet if you might call
it. Similar emergency transmitters are already available for yachts and boats.

The mystery of MH370 may uncover a number of simultaneous problems or
deficiencies of procedure.

------
smackfu
Even if you know exactly where the airplane broke up, finding debris can be
very difficult:

* There often aren't many big pieces left after a breakup at 550 MPH.

* The debris is falling 7 miles, so where it actually lands is pretty random and dependent on the shape / weight of the debris. Lower density debris probably travels further.

* Most debris sinks when it does get to the ocean.

* The lower density debris that floats moves in currents.

* You can't search at night, so the floating debris might move considerably before you can start searching.

------
colund
Does anyone think this air crash investigation will be anything like the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870)
investigation? It also exploded over sea, pieces were found. First they
thought it exploded due to a missile from a military jet. Then some engineers
found out that the explosion was a bomb in a rear airplane toilet.

~~~
yeukhon
No one know yet. Until they found the aircraft and the blackbox, they can only
suspect. There are reports of passengers checked in with stolen passports but
the government and the airline think the possibility of terrorism is low.
Let's hope we can discover the missing aircraft soon.

------
tobiasu
Before you waste time with better data logging, please install an ejection
seat, parachute, and a built-in life support system. That's much more useful
than sensors that record the demise of the passengers to satisfy the bloodlust
of news corps.

Or rationally, don't change a damn thing. Airliners are fine. Any other form
of transportation (maybe with the exception of trains) is many times more
deadly and we cope with that risk just fine.

~~~
ars
> That's much more useful

Not really. The hard part is knowing when to use such a system. In most of the
catastrophic crashes I've heard about no one knew they were in danger till
they were dead.

> to satisfy the bloodlust of news corps

That's not what it's for, that's horrible thinking. It's for determining what
happened so we can prevent it from happening again!

> Any other form of transportation (maybe with the exception of trains) is
> many times more deadly and we cope with that risk just fine.

Because of those same data recorders you denigrate! And now that we've reached
a plateau of sorts, it's time to move to the next level.

------
kb6kgx
I presume that the “black box” is located somewhere in the plane that is
likely quite inaccessible to the crew and/or terrorists that may wish to
disable it. It’s a sealed box, and I would presume that the crew would not
have the tools to open it and that it is unlikely to have a simple “on/off”
switch with which to turn it off.

But… COULD it have been diaabled? Why have no “pings” been picked up as yet?

------
kb6kgx
I presume that the “black box” is located somewhere in the plane that is
likely quite inaccessible to the crew and/or terrorists that may wish to
disable it. It’s a sealed box, and I would presume that the crew would not
have the tools to open it and that it is unlikely to have a simple “on/off”
switch with which to turn it off.

------
bryonics
Plane designed to carry more than 20 passengers: Require three modified spot
satellite transmitters, self activating on power loss, one on each wingtip and
the top of the rudder. They should self release after immersion in 5 feet of
water and be buoyant. $1000 to install, $100 a year. Cheap insurance.

------
bnzelener
You'd think Boingo would have explored this from the start with their Wifi
connection.

Even though it's consumer-facing, I'm sure they could have reserved a small
subset of bandwidth to experiment with realtime flight data.

------
bitcuration
It truly is shame that the aviation industry keeps itself at a pace of in
ovation once a decade.

------
naaaaak
The solution is streaming the data at all times. The idea of a black box is an
antiquity - something used as a backup to the stream, perhaps.

Hold on while I go patent the shit out of this (yeah right, fuck the USPTO if
they approve something so obvious).

------
dnqthao
i would like to know how NASA received the data from the Space Shuttle
Columbia in 2003. Can we use the same technology for commercial aircraft ?

------
kelliechew
How would you remotely shut one off?

