Something needs to be done

We are having too many plane crashes where we have no idea what happened.

In this high-tech age it seems archaic that we have to have "supposedly" indestructible boxes on aircraft to record what happened.

It should be possible to broadcast this data and more, back  to a hub in real time.  If we can handle billions of texts, we can manage the data from a 100,000 planes, I'm sure.

The only downside is that we would know before a crash that it was going to happen, but we could do nothing about it.  We could however, have all the data instantly available in order to prevent future similar incidents.

DaveP

well lets see out of the ones making the major news in the last year or so

we had the malaysia air that went missing

we had that one shot down in russia

and then we had this current one over the alps.

are there any I am missing?

True words. In spaceflight this was no big deal either.

This has been being kicked around for years, triggered by the air france crash in the atlantic. Current thinking is to do periodic burst transmissions of location and heading every few minutes to satellite so we can at least locate the crash.  AFAIK one satellite com company is hosting this service for free now but may charge for it later.

I doubt the air crew would like to stream the cockpit communication for permanent archive  and there are a lot of planes in the air, but yes we can do a better job than now.

I worry we are the threshold of planes being so automated that pilots forget how to fly them. While robots can pretty much fly them now. We could even take over by remote control if we aren't worried about that being hacked. 

JR 

"are there any I am missing?"

There was also another Air Malaysia that took ages to find, but they found the black box on that one.  It apparently tried to climb at a higher rate than it was designed to and stalled.

DaveP

pucho812 said:

well lets see out of the ones making the major news in the last year or so

we had the malaysia air that went missing

we had that one shot down in russia

and then we had this current one over the alps.

are there any I am missing?

Click to expand...

Air asia from indonesia to singapore just before new year....

I think all that "needs to be done" is to write a large check.

I think there is such a system; however it is a commercial service, and they need to be paid.

I think some of the recent plane-downs have been "budget operators" who would not spring for such a frill.

With costs mounting in some recent searches, governments may decide to require it on all planes over any area they may have to flood with search craft for months, as in one recent vanishing. $1K/month/plane looks cheaper than $10M for an extended debris hunt, aside from putting the cost on the company instead of emergency government funding.

It may be "enough" to transmit Lat Long Alt and serial number every minute. That would spot the plane within 10 miles, which is smaller than some recent searches; also clarify what they were doing just-before. At 9,600 baud such a burst is 0.1 milliSeconds. Many hundreds of planes could transmit such bursts asynchronously with very few data-collisions (an unfortunate name from EtherNet theory).

Those Boeings must already be fly by remote control; they certainly have an emergency intervention system.
http://guardianlv.com/2014/03/boeing-777-could-have-been-reprogrammed-from-the-ground/

Russia is happy for you to chat through takeoff and landing
http://www.news.az/articles/region/96443

Odd that the pulverized latest blackbox is immediately telling us things when the MH17 blackbox seems to be less forthcoming.

I remember when all you had to worry about was drunk pilots. Now you have to worry if they are suicidal (Egypt Air, Mozanbique, and that Mayasia jet that still hasn't been found).

It seems less likely 2-3 people will all feel like committing suicide at the same time...

If I trusted computer systems more, it might make sense to take over auto pilot remotely, but that could be disastrous if hacked, and a suicidal live pilot could probably still over ride safety systems.

Interesting story developing...

JR

Good luck suicidal computers doesn't exist! oh, wait, google is implementing it for stolen phones... Also remote control would make no need for a suicidal person to make an attack, if the trusted one who is in front of the remote control (always will be one) could make it without having to die in it.

I don't know about all this, maybe that information floating in the air is not such a good idea for security considerations. If we get into a good encryption to prevent someone who doesn't suppose to have that information be able get it everything is slower and start to be a problem. A few suppliers of the service would be needed, which brings other problems. I don't know how sensitive all this information is, but I see it might be a problem if anyone could have it.

I guess positioning for easier finding of the lost plane would be no so sensitive but still you need to rescue the black box if you want the rest of the information, in some areas it would still be pretty tricky!

JS

Isn't it true that on one of the airbus planes that the computer will override the pilot?  There was a case where this was happening something of moisture freezing and sending a fault reading and the airbus "auto" system took over to compensate and pilots had no control over what the plane was doing.    Maybe not the Boeing, I forget which one...

MicDaddy said:

Isn't it true that on one of the airbus planes that the computer will override the pilot?  There was a case where this was happening something of moisture freezing and sending a fault reading and the airbus "auto" system took over to compensate and pilots had no control over what the plane was doing.    Maybe not the Boeing, I forget which one...

Click to expand...

Perhaps in auto-pilot if an external pilot tube air speed indicator ices up and misreports air speed (I think that air france crash in the atlantic speculated something like that happened). The pilot can generally over ride such things, while there has been some discussion of being abel to take control remotely (but I don't trust integrity of remote control networks).

There may be some  anti-collison  automatic avoidance routines.

It seems auto-pilot should NOT accept commands to fly underground.

JR

This a good one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKBABNL-DDM

It's got bruce dickenson when he was hosting a show on discoveries wing channel.  It's him flying an airbuss a320 and all about  it's safety functions

JohnRoberts said:

...
It seems auto-pilot should NOT accept commands to fly underground.

JR

Click to expand...

What if the instrument fails and reads backwards, I think the pilot can see the plane wants to fly underground believing it's upside down and pilot should take control, even if the plane thinks it's underground. The problem is both, machine and human can fail, the question is who you trust more. If both are in the same page there is no problem, if there was only one you trust them, the problem if you have two options (the auto pilot and the human pilot) and they want to do different things which one the plane takes... I've heard if the pilot directly contradicts an autopilot's movement it makes what the human says, I don't know if that's true on the A320 but there's always a way for it to fail. Redundancy is always safer, but you know your voltage till you get your second DMM...

JS

Dumbass will always win if he's on a mission but only in isolated incidents.

If we look at this more in the context to # of flights /day and # of flights/day that end up with lost souls.....

Same thing happens with dumbass on the highway. Just more of it.

-jb