8 ms·

31 years later, we found the flight recorders

213 points by bond 10y ago

vermontdevil 10y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980 The crash.
- wrigby 10y ago
  Non-mobile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980
  - brillenfux 10y ago
    Thanks. Or use this[1] with this[2]. [1] http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ [2] http://sprunge.us/hMAE?json http://sprunge.us/hMAE?json
- jlarocco 10y ago
  Thanks. An article that long could have spared a paragraph or two for some context.
raverbashing 10y ago
What's on the last picture is mostly casing. They seem to have found a magnetic roll that hopefully contains data, but there's some risk they found nothing
- puddintane 10y ago
  I am excited to see what the tape holds, hopefully it will give a bit of closure to the families of those lost.
  - fergbrain 10y ago
    It looks to be from a VHS tape. Also, a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR)/Flight Data Recorder (FDR) would likely be setup to record in a loop. You can do that with magnetic tape, but not in the configure it appears to be in. I'll try to remember to look up what CVR would have been used for that plane when I get back to work in a week.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jessaustin 10y ago
Will Wikipedia ever get responsive? [EDIT:] In other words, Wikipedia seems to be the last vestige of the dumb old "separate web for mobile" mindset of ideas like WML. Media queries are just better, and would prevent this inane "that link sucks for half of us; here's one that sucks for the other half" crap.
- feld 10y ago
  What does this mean? edit: oh dear, responsive web design.
  - drostie 10y ago
    Responsive design is the design ideal of not having two separate sites -- one for mobile and the other for desktop -- but rather just being able to visit one site and have its CSS dynamically adjust so that it looks good in all screen sizes.
    - feld 10y ago
      If you can do it without adding a bloated JavaScript framework and adding tons of requests to a page load, sure. If you can't do that I'd prefer auto detection by the load balancer and redirects to the mobile site
      - extrapickles 10y ago
        You can do a fair amount these days with CSS thanks to flex-box, it handles the row based layout transition to column based quite well. A benefit of using CSS is that it handles browser zoom and high dpi screens much better as you can use units other than pixels (eg: em/rem, vh/vw, %). From a architecture point of view, you want to keep layout logic out of the JavaScript anyways as JS should be for interactions and other 'nice to have' behaviors.
      - RobertKerans 10y ago
        Jesus, you don't need frameworks or sniffing, it's an almost all-text site with very minimal styling. It's almost more difficult to make it non-responsive. There isn't anything really on the desktop version that isn't on the mobile, so I'm not sure where those extra requests would be coming from. Sorry for the the tetchy reply, I just find it nuts that, to get around writing maybe a page of CSS, people build and maintain an entirely separate site that has to be in lockstep to the the first, along with ever-reliable sniffing, and then say that is the simpler way to do it. There are several scenarios where it turns.out to be useful; this isn't one of them
aminorex 10y ago
even today there are flight recorders. isn't that completely whack and irresponsible? just let everyone turn on their cellphones, and voila, suddenly there are a hundred flight recorders on every flight, streaming real-time. (yes, if you are severely asp-burger you will find that last sentence to be irresistible baiting - sigh.) seriously, relying on a physical device for information security in a physical destruction event over deep water is pretty stupid when there are more LEOs that you can shake a dipole at.
- kylehotchkiss 10y ago
  There just isn't adequate satellite internet worldwide to trust that system just yet. Airplanes don't even broadcast their coordinates to satellites in many airlines, despite existing networks likely (ie Iridium) being able to handle the small increase in data (if they kept the packets small - just flight number/lat/lon - and let the satellites figure out where to send and what time the packets come, the total size from all flights worldwide every hour could still remain under 200mb)
  - emdowling 10y ago
    It's truly mind boggling that airlines don't do this. Given the cost of an aircraft and the value it represents, surely the data cost is more than worth it. I hope MH370 has changed the mindset of airlines and aircraft manufacturers. I know that pilots are against live streaming, always on voice recorders in the cockpit due to privacy concerns but surely there are ways to regulate access to that (eg: it goes to the safety regulator of the airline's country of governance and is held for 48 hours, released only if an accident occurs). I don't put a server into staging use let alone production use without having comprehensive monitoring in place for CPU, memory, etc. Putting a $200mm+ aircraft in the sky without monitoring every single thing in real time with multiple layers of redundancy seems unbelievably insane.
    - shpx 10y ago
      Royls Royce sends performance data of its jet engines over satellites. https://youtu.be/_30T6MqdSlw?t=43m19s https://youtu.be/_30T6MqdSlw?t=43m19s
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
anonova 10y ago
For those interested, Bill Hammack (Engineer Guy) pulled apart a 1970s-era flight recorder in an old video.[1] The one in video, though, gets etched to a roll of tin rather than recorded to a magnetic tape. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlY5W7be5jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlY5W7be5jU
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
trhway 10y ago
what seems to be the main cargo of the plane - illegally trafficked (by the airline itself) caiman skins: https://operationthonapa.com/an-international-smuggling-ring-driven-by-gross-80s-fashion-55ac5d3136e0#.y81syko2o https://operationthonapa.com/an-international-smuggling-ring... "Pieces of snake/alligator/crocodile skins are scattered all over the mountain. In picking up a plane part for a closer look, often there would be crocodile hide on or near the part. They are in such abundance that we actually became quite sick of them as we combed the field for the black box. ... While we don’t think this is the sole reason for the bungling of the investigation immediately following the crash (10 months before an expedition was mounted!), these illegal animal skins are part of a larger pattern of smuggling illegal goods on Eastern Airlines commercial flights. Someone in the organization was making money on these sketchy practices. If some of this money found its way to the right pockets, it would been easy to delay the appropriate investigational response until many feet of snow/ice covered the crash site."
- 13of40 10y ago
  I read the Wikipedia article, and it seemed strange they were flying with only 19 passengers. Maybe the smuggling is what made it profitable?
  - pseingatl 10y ago
    I worked in cargo for a Latin American airline in the 1970's. Our fleet consisted solely of 727's. Back then, cargo prices were regulated. Our cargo operations paid for the airline's costs; passengers were profit. Even without passengers we paid the bills. Also, keep in mind that the aircraft would pick up passengers in Bolivia who were going to Miami. If you were in Paraguay flying to Bolivia there were a lot of better local choices than waiting for the flight from Miami.
derFunk 10y ago
If I entered the coordinates correctly, this is the location on Google Maps: 16°40'08.5"S 67°46'26.8"W https://goo.gl/maps/cYD3aXH5PuN2 https://goo.gl/maps/cYD3aXH5PuN2
WalterBright 10y ago
> Boeing green That's BMS 10-11 Type 2 primer. It's a very good corrosion resistant zinc chromate paint.

213 points by bond 10y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980 The crash.

wrigby 10y ago
Non-mobile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_980
- brillenfux 10y ago
  Thanks. Or use this[1] with this[2]. [1] http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ [2] http://sprunge.us/hMAE?json http://sprunge.us/hMAE?json
jlarocco 10y ago
Thanks. An article that long could have spared a paragraph or two for some context.

raverbashing 10y ago

What's on the last picture is mostly casing. They seem to have found a magnetic roll that hopefully contains data, but there's some risk they found nothing

puddintane 10y ago
I am excited to see what the tape holds, hopefully it will give a bit of closure to the families of those lost.
- fergbrain 10y ago
  It looks to be from a VHS tape. Also, a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR)/Flight Data Recorder (FDR) would likely be setup to record in a loop. You can do that with magnetic tape, but not in the configure it appears to be in. I'll try to remember to look up what CVR would have been used for that plane when I get back to work in a week.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jessaustin 10y ago

Will Wikipedia ever get responsive? [EDIT:] In other words, Wikipedia seems to be the last vestige of the dumb old "separate web for mobile" mindset of ideas like WML. Media queries are just better, and would prevent this inane "that link sucks for half of us; here's one that sucks for the other half" crap.

feld 10y ago
What does this mean? edit: oh dear, responsive web design.
- drostie 10y ago
  Responsive design is the design ideal of not having two separate sites -- one for mobile and the other for desktop -- but rather just being able to visit one site and have its CSS dynamically adjust so that it looks good in all screen sizes.
  - feld 10y ago
    If you can do it without adding a bloated JavaScript framework and adding tons of requests to a page load, sure. If you can't do that I'd prefer auto detection by the load balancer and redirects to the mobile site
    - extrapickles 10y ago
      You can do a fair amount these days with CSS thanks to flex-box, it handles the row based layout transition to column based quite well. A benefit of using CSS is that it handles browser zoom and high dpi screens much better as you can use units other than pixels (eg: em/rem, vh/vw, %). From a architecture point of view, you want to keep layout logic out of the JavaScript anyways as JS should be for interactions and other 'nice to have' behaviors.
    - RobertKerans 10y ago
      Jesus, you don't need frameworks or sniffing, it's an almost all-text site with very minimal styling. It's almost more difficult to make it non-responsive. There isn't anything really on the desktop version that isn't on the mobile, so I'm not sure where those extra requests would be coming from. Sorry for the the tetchy reply, I just find it nuts that, to get around writing maybe a page of CSS, people build and maintain an entirely separate site that has to be in lockstep to the the first, along with ever-reliable sniffing, and then say that is the simpler way to do it. There are several scenarios where it turns.out to be useful; this isn't one of them

aminorex 10y ago

even today there are flight recorders. isn't that completely whack and irresponsible? just let everyone turn on their cellphones, and voila, suddenly there are a hundred flight recorders on every flight, streaming real-time. (yes, if you are severely asp-burger you will find that last sentence to be irresistible baiting - sigh.) seriously, relying on a physical device for information security in a physical destruction event over deep water is pretty stupid when there are more LEOs that you can shake a dipole at.

kylehotchkiss 10y ago
There just isn't adequate satellite internet worldwide to trust that system just yet. Airplanes don't even broadcast their coordinates to satellites in many airlines, despite existing networks likely (ie Iridium) being able to handle the small increase in data (if they kept the packets small - just flight number/lat/lon - and let the satellites figure out where to send and what time the packets come, the total size from all flights worldwide every hour could still remain under 200mb)
- emdowling 10y ago
  It's truly mind boggling that airlines don't do this. Given the cost of an aircraft and the value it represents, surely the data cost is more than worth it. I hope MH370 has changed the mindset of airlines and aircraft manufacturers. I know that pilots are against live streaming, always on voice recorders in the cockpit due to privacy concerns but surely there are ways to regulate access to that (eg: it goes to the safety regulator of the airline's country of governance and is held for 48 hours, released only if an accident occurs). I don't put a server into staging use let alone production use without having comprehensive monitoring in place for CPU, memory, etc. Putting a $200mm+ aircraft in the sky without monitoring every single thing in real time with multiple layers of redundancy seems unbelievably insane.
  - shpx 10y ago
    Royls Royce sends performance data of its jet engines over satellites. https://youtu.be/_30T6MqdSlw?t=43m19s https://youtu.be/_30T6MqdSlw?t=43m19s

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

anonova 10y ago

For those interested, Bill Hammack (Engineer Guy) pulled apart a 1970s-era flight recorder in an old video.[1] The one in video, though, gets etched to a roll of tin rather than recorded to a magnetic tape. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlY5W7be5jU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlY5W7be5jU

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

trhway 10y ago

what seems to be the main cargo of the plane - illegally trafficked (by the airline itself) caiman skins: https://operationthonapa.com/an-international-smuggling-ring-driven-by-gross-80s-fashion-55ac5d3136e0#.y81syko2o https://operationthonapa.com/an-international-smuggling-ring... "Pieces of snake/alligator/crocodile skins are scattered all over the mountain. In picking up a plane part for a closer look, often there would be crocodile hide on or near the part. They are in such abundance that we actually became quite sick of them as we combed the field for the black box. ... While we don’t think this is the sole reason for the bungling of the investigation immediately following the crash (10 months before an expedition was mounted!), these illegal animal skins are part of a larger pattern of smuggling illegal goods on Eastern Airlines commercial flights. Someone in the organization was making money on these sketchy practices. If some of this money found its way to the right pockets, it would been easy to delay the appropriate investigational response until many feet of snow/ice covered the crash site."

13of40 10y ago
I read the Wikipedia article, and it seemed strange they were flying with only 19 passengers. Maybe the smuggling is what made it profitable?
- pseingatl 10y ago
  I worked in cargo for a Latin American airline in the 1970's. Our fleet consisted solely of 727's. Back then, cargo prices were regulated. Our cargo operations paid for the airline's costs; passengers were profit. Even without passengers we paid the bills. Also, keep in mind that the aircraft would pick up passengers in Bolivia who were going to Miami. If you were in Paraguay flying to Bolivia there were a lot of better local choices than waiting for the flight from Miami.

derFunk 10y ago

If I entered the coordinates correctly, this is the location on Google Maps: 16°40'08.5"S 67°46'26.8"W https://goo.gl/maps/cYD3aXH5PuN2 https://goo.gl/maps/cYD3aXH5PuN2

WalterBright 10y ago

> Boeing green That's BMS 10-11 Type 2 primer. It's a very good corrosion resistant zinc chromate paint.