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The challenge would be to make such a device fully autonomous while yet being safe; someone intentionally trying to fly the plane into the great void, never to
by lb1lf 10y ago
The challenge would be to make such a device fully autonomous while yet being safe; someone intentionally trying to fly the plane into the great void, never to be seen again is an exceedingly rare scenario.
It is, however, an option such a tracking device should try to stay on top of. Hence, it would be best if the crew could not disable it.
The problem with that design decision made, of course, is that it would be a shame if a plane fell from the sky because of a failed tracking device which the crew couldn't disable (typically fire because of an electrical issue).
However, there are intrinsically safe radio transmitters available for use in explosion-hazard environments, where fire obviously is a big no-no.
Problem? It would need its own, dedicated power supply; probably a battery (which comes with its own set of challenges!) charged via solar panels and aircraft power.
Making systems tamperproof and failsafe is hard. Should be doable, though, leaving the question of who is to foot the bill; chances are that will be a bigger problem to solve than the engineering side of it.
- ricardobeat 10y agoThese "problems" are already solved in black boxes. What is actually missing is constant transmission of GPS data through every flight.
- lb1lf 10y agoThe black boxes do not start transmitting until after the plane has crashed. Also, I am pretty confident the crew can pull the fuse on the flight recorders if need arise.
- Mendenhall 10y agoDoes it make sense to you to perhaps not make it a black box, but basically just a "loud" pinger that can help you find the black boxes ? I understand the vastness of the ocean but it just seems there has to be a way to at least get them quicker and closer to the original crash site, but I am ignorant of the technical side of such a thing as far as ranges etc.
- lb1lf 10y agoThe problem with a very loud pinger would be battery life; in order to be audible over large distances, it would require much energy and hence either work for a shorter time than today's boxes OR be heavier (which the airlines would hate for the added fuel consumption; in addition, the extra mass would make it harder to crash-proof it sufficiently) The whole problem becomes a lot easier to handle if the boxes were more or less guaranteed to detach from the body and remain afloat; then they could ping a satellite and we'd know just where to look. That requires orders of magnitude less energy than transmitting an acoustic signal underwater. (Such devices can be very small; the PLB I carry whenever I work offshore is the size of a slightly clunky cellphone and yet will let rescue services know my position to a few dozen yards minutes after I fell overboard - as long as I try to not do my man overboard-act too close to the poles, where coverage is spotty-ish. Affix half a dozen of these loosely to an aircraft, be prepared to handle a ton of false alarms - and we'd know where planes come down at sea more or less instantly. Matter of fact, it'd be so quick the first sign of trouble an airline was likely to get would be rescue services calling to ask whether they are SURE their flight such-and-such didn't crash at, say, 61 degrees 32'11.4752"N, 14 degrees 11'37.8531"W 47 seconds ago?