FAA Mandates Major Aircraft "Black Box" Upgrade 277
coondoggie writes "Earlier this week the FAA mandated upgrades and updates to aircraft voice and data recorders within the US. The goal of the updates: to assist future investigations with 'more and better data' from accidents and incidents. The 'mandate means manufacturers such as Honeywell and L-3 Communications as well as operators of airplanes and helicopters with 10 or more seats, must employ voice recorders, also known as black boxes, that capture the last two hours of cockpit audio instead of the current 15 to 30 minutes. The new rules also require an independent backup power source for the voice recorders to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted. Voice recorders also must use solid state technology instead of magnetic tape, which is vulnerable to damage and loss of reliability.'"
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:-1, Insightful)
Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:1, Insightful)
When everyone can get $40 mp3 players with 8 hour playback time on next to no power, you would thing this is going to be the cheapest thing ever. Even general purpose data recorders should be cheap when GB worth are so commonly available. Then you run into qualifications and secrets. Watch these boxes run into the thousands of dollars per aircraft and weep for the paying public.
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:3, Insightful)
It certainly survived all the standard test (like puncture, high temperatures for extended time periods, etc).
So, yes, this is very easy to do in this day and age. (Done again, it would undoubtedly be better to use SD cards, as these are even smaller than CF, require fewer connection to the interface and would make the insulation/protection even easier!
Upgrades needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You'd think (Score:3, Insightful)
Realtime Streaming (Score:4, Insightful)
They should keep the crash-proof boxes, for events that stop the streaing before the recorder stops. But why should they have to always wait to investigate the data until after a little box, that could have been itself destroyed in the massive crash, be found amidst all the debris, scattered sometimes across dozens of miles of often inaccessible terrain? If the data is streamed live, they might also find the box sooner, if the box has a GPS that continues streaming after the box has landed somewhere.
This seems elementary. Why not do it already, now that both air flight and radio have been with us for over a century?
Re:Why even use a hard drive? (Score:3, Insightful)
The big problem I see with streaming the data off is keeping it working under adverse conditions. Afaict in a large proportion of crashes some kind of adverse weather conditions or unusually low flight or power failures or other things that are likely to screw up communications are involved.
Re:You almost make it sound fair. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did Giuliani join the FAA? (Score:3, Insightful)
Little known issue with flash memory. (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Loss of Reliability (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Realtime Streaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Strict Laws (Score:4, Insightful)
So the recorder does not record much data from after the crash over data from before the crash.
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who says any kind of consumer electronics device is going to work after hitting the ground at 1200kph, obviously has no idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austral_L%C3%ADneas_A%C3%A9reas_Flight_2553 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Black_box.aeroplane.JPG [wikipedia.org]
But they *do* fail (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a lot easier to reenforce a small robust item than a large fragile one. Smaller is inherently stronger because they have less stresses due to acceleration etc. F= m a
A small solidstate recorder with some accelerometers etc could likely be made a lot cheaper, smaller and tougher than the monsters of today.
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to use multiple smaller tapes, consider the following. While improvements in technology have allowed us to make smaller tapes, they have also reduced the physical tolerances in the recorder. A head mashing against a tape isn't as disastrous as a hard drive head crash, but it still can't be good for the media. The tensile strength of the smaller tape would also have to be evaluated to make sure it doesn't self-destruct on sudden acceleration. Again, if one tape snaps under certain conditions a redundant one probably will snap too. Maybe the older tapes are more durable. Maybe they aren't. Without testing it's impossible to tell. Testing costs money.
I hope I don't have to explain why spinning platter hard drives are not a good idea on a flight recorder.
Give the original engineers a bit of credit. Those analog tapes might be stone-age and oversized, but they're time-tested and they work. The reluctance to replace them comes from years of experience saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" -- especially when lives hang in the balance. If we can design something that withstands impact better, then that's great, but we need to be very cautious not to introduce new flaws.
cockpit video (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Realtime Streaming (Score:2, Insightful)
I also don't see where you'd generate any cost savings by shortening the wait time after a crash. Since the crash already occured. Response teams are going to be in action as soon as possible after the crash regardless. They're going to be collecting debris. The only way I can see any savings from finding the recorder faster or having the streamed data available.. would be if the issue that caused the crash occured frequently enough that we could expect days to make a difference in preventing another crash. Which is possible, I'll grant. But unlikely. So.. your suggestion seems to guard against the rare occurance of an event that can only occur after another rare event.
And all it would cost is millions per day, at least. Assuming, of course, that the current aircraft to ground comm infrastructure could handle the traffic without expansion. If it couldn't, thats an even greater expense.
All of which might be worthwhile if there really are a high percentage of crashes that could've been prevented by staff on the ground correctly diagnosing problems that the pilots are incorrectly diagnosing. So not only would you have to first show me that such a thing would be the case, you'd also have to tell me why the pilots are so poorly trained with respect to inflight emergencies, while the ground staff is so well trained.
And if you want to argue that we could save lives, that may be true. We could also save lives by never putting an aircraft in the sky again. No fliers, no crashes. We don't do this because we, consciously or not, make risk and cost assessments every day, in everything we do.
wide angle view (Score:3, Insightful)
This is far from the common attitude in some other places around the world. In some other countries, operating an "airline" is still a very seat-of-the-pants operation -- passengers are unrecorded, cargo is misloaded, pilots are bribed to take things they don't know about, etc. And if a plane were to crash, people would throw up their hands and say, "what can be done, these things just happen", or "it's God's will that accidents occur", or "why talk about it?". But here, we've been accustomed to understanding that there were tangible causes behind every accident, and if we could only see the moments before the crash (since often no one survives to tell us what happened), we might be able to prevent future accidents. This is an admirable thing that I am very grateful for.
The state of the technology and awareness of safety are so advanced that accidents have decreased so much in the US, that the NTSB/airlines, having fewer crashes to investigate, now analyze the data from normal flights, and look for patterns that suggest unsafe conditions -- and they change those unsafe conditions. see this article for example [nytimes.com]
Finally, just regarding some of the other points made here, I am not an expert, but I think it would be impractical to have a nonstop streaming black box. These recorders not only capture audio, but sub-second sampled data for dozens, if not scores of readings from the aircraft systems -- non stop. Multiply that by the number of planes in the sky, and it quickly becomes overwhelming I think. Most airplane data systems are at the text messaging level of bandwidth.
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It sounds so easy but (Score:2, Insightful)
(Emphasis mine)
By the time they're searching for the recorder, its ability to function won't have any impact on lives, just lawsuits.
Re:You almost make it sound fair. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, basically this is what I imagined. I trust you can open that box and replace the tape recorder and the rest of the device will function well. That should be cheap and easy, unless all of the innards are closely guarded company secrets. If that's the case, and the instrumentation recording also has to be replaced, your company has the ability to rape the flying public that I worried about.
Please excuse my profanity, but I've had it up to here with wise-ass fools who think they're clever shooting their mouths off about shit they clearly don't understand.