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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 tec

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - Zancarius 13y ago
    > because the only way we can stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area) I think this hits an important point that's lost in the media scuffle that inevitably ensues. Because modern travel has made the world so much smaller, most people have a difficult time trying to fathom precisely how vast the oceans are and that we base our notion of coverage on what familiarities surround us--that is to say: land.
  - m4x 13y ago
    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
    - jarek 13y ago
      Presumably you've read the story of what went on in the AF 447 cockpit - do you suppose adding one more voice to the cacophony of warnings would really have helped? Two seasoned pilots that were in the cockpit didn't fully realize what was happening - there's no guarantee a remote overseer dealing with incomplete and inconsistent data would have either.
    - hga 13y ago
      That's demanding rather a lot from a human on the ground. The Boeing (and I'm sure others) design philosophy is "unsynchronized joysticks ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA", and if Airbus and Air France had use the normal synchronized yokes, the problem of the brain wedged junior pilot would have been quickly apparent. Can you think of other examples? BTW, it's guessed that iced up pitot tubes caused the autopilot to disengage. You're also assuming the pilots would listen to a kibitzer from afar while struggling to fix their plane. Plus a hell of a lot of expensive technology to support all that. And expensive kibitzers looking over the pilot's shoulders, which the latter wouldn't like.
- Zancarius 13y ago
  The problem is that accident events (or events leading to an accident) happen in real time, and the flight recorders record a lot of data from the flight controls and instruments. As others have pointed out in the comments for another story, what happens if their aircraft's orientation occludes the antenna or something breaks off? From what I've read of most accidents, the recorders work quite well and often continue working until cables are severed (in which case satellite communications wouldn't work either), in-flight fires consume the aircraft, etc. Technology will unlikely replace flight records, which have a proven track record (provided they can be found... but not as many have gone missing as you might think), but it can certainly augment it. I still don't think it's as good a solution to the "real time" problem as having the recorder on board the accident aircraft itself. Edit: Sibling comment from objclxt incidentally is the same user who illustrated the problems with satellite communications I alluded to. See objclxt's comment history for details.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Theodores 13y ago
  Iridium? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation Beam up some coordinates every minute from an Iridium phone strapped to the roof. Pair it to an iPad to get those coordinates. Maybe have a second phone/ipad strapped onto the underside too just in case the plane ends up flying upside down.
GauntletWizard 13y ago
Flightradar24 has a fantastic primer on what tech is used to track aircraft, and what it's limitations are: http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works
denzil_correa 13y ago
There was another snippet from the article which was interesting. > A recent patent application filed by Boeing describes such a system, which specifies a limited data set including the precise location of the aircraft and the flight control inputs by the pilot or the automation system. Clearly, Boeing themselves are thinking towards continuous tracking of a flight.
melling 13y ago
The planes are traveling 8 or 9 miles a minute. If it goes down mostly intact (i.e. not a lot of debris), there's a lot of ocean that you'll need to search. Personally, I'd feel better if the plane simply pinged its location every few seconds to a satellite so rescue teams know immediately where to look. Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?
- Zancarius 13y ago
  > Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it? Apparently 2-3 kilometers according to [1], which I found in the comments from here [2]. [1] http://www.hydro-international.com/issues/articles/id1098-Air_France_Flight_AF.html http://www.hydro-international.com/issues/articles/id1098-Ai... [2] http://www.aticourses.com/blog/index.php/tag/side-scan-sonar/ http://www.aticourses.com/blog/index.php/tag/side-scan-sonar...
  - melling 13y ago
    So, if the plane is traveling at 13 km a minutes and you have a 20 minute window, it's going to take a long time to find it. Doesn't the technology exist to detect low power signals from a much greater distance? The US military must be able to do it?
    - adanto6840 13y ago
      I'm more surprised that there isn't a single (imagery-related) satellite that would, over the last 24 hours or so, have taken imagery (or been able to be re-assigned to do so) of the area(s) of interest. If for nothing else than to rule out some areas / possible outcomes... But yeah, very far out of my realm of expertise, though I do hope to finish my PPL fairly soon & am an avid AVHerald & LiveATC follower! :-) http://www.liveatc.net/forums/ http://www.liveatc.net/forums/ http://www.avherald.com/ http://www.avherald.com/
      - Maxious 13y ago
pcurve 13y ago
In both Air France 447 and Malay Air MH370, local authorities found traces of crash / wreckage within 1-2 days. People don't fully appreciate how difficult it is to find anything in the middle of ocean when there's no visual trace. Even if you can narrow down the point of impact within a few square miles, you won't know for sure until you get underwater equipment. When you're dealing with deep underwater recovery, all bets are off. I think low-tech solution would be effective. Perhaps install a few dozen chemically activated florescent devices throughout the plane that would float.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  Yes. It took two years and multiple teams (including submarine) until Titanic team came and found the blackbox and the remains of the aircraft deep on the seabed.
- AmVess 13y ago
  It's difficult even on land. I recall an accident that involved a twin engine light aircraft that vanished in the middle of the night in Alaska perhaps 20 years ago. Search parties searched for quite some time, but gave up. Five years later, the plane was found in the woods some 100 meters away from a fairly frequently traveled two-lane road.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    Forget Alaska, there are crashes in Nevada which haven't been found after decades. A large airliner would be easier to find on land though - just look for the glow.
    - crazytony 13y ago
      Aside from Alaska (which has some radar limitations due to the terrain) I'm pretty sure none of those accidents occurred after coast-to-coast radar coverage came in to force in the continental US. Believe it or not until 1973! there were massive land-based lighthouses all across the United States that would illuminate the aerial pathways that aircraft would use to get across the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airway_beacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airway_beacon
raverbashing 13y ago
We can and do track aircraft through several systems: ACARS, ADS-B reading position info through GPS (and others) Wifi and cell-phone have speed limitations (receiver transmitter), also, they are not adequate for something flying 500knots at 35kfeet However, it is true that systems could be upgraded and offer a bigger bandwidth (within a certain limit)
rayiner 13y ago
> There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. We have billions of dollars of equipment focused on tracking that rover, and we still lose contact with it sometimes.
- judk 13y ago
  Billions, really? Excluding the equipment used to send the rover to Mars?
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The Deep Space Network:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/m/news/news.php?release=2013-370#.Ux1AqMvD_cc http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/m/news/news.php?release=2013-370#.Ux....
- exodust 13y ago
  we lose contact with the Mars Rover by design. There's a 3 hour window of communication each day. Outside of that window, the rover is on its own.
rjzzleep 13y ago
as i mentioned below, some engines already send flight data to satellites. ironically some of these newer engines also have much higher failure rates. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/airbus-engine-explosion-rollsroyce-fault-8677717.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/airbus-engin... http://atwonline.com/engines/final-qantas-a380-engine-failure-report-blames-faulty-rolls-royce-oil-pipe http://atwonline.com/engines/final-qantas-a380-engine-failur... http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/monitoring_systems.jsp http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/mon...
pavelrub 13y ago
I'm not convinced by your argument. I'm not sure what you mean by 'something catastrophic happens'. 'Something catastrophic' is the result of a certain chain of events. Telemetry data about those events can be sent before they lead to 'something catastrophic' that makes it impossible to send anything further. It is not as if the plane hits a meteor in mid flight and everything suddenly explodes with no prior indication of anything going wrong. And even if that's the case (as being accidentally hit by a missile during training - this happened before) - the lack of telemetry will also tell us something.
- brandon272 13y ago
  I'm not thinking of meteors when I describe a "catastrophic" event. I'm thinking of a fuel tank explosion like TWA Flight 800 or a missile hitting the plane or a bomb in the cargo hold going off or a stress fracture on the fuselage causing an inflight breakup. None of which have been ruled out on the Malaysian flight, I should add.
  - pavelrub 13y ago
    Those "catastrophic" events represent a tiny percentage of flight crashes, and a black-box wouldn't help to properly diagnose them either. Your argument still doesn't make sense.
aortega 13y ago
> There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. We can track any commercial airliner on earth, but not under 5 Km of water.

kevingadd 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
- Zancarius 13y ago
  > because the only way we can stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area) I think this hits an important point that's lost in the media scuffle that inevitably ensues. Because modern travel has made the world so much smaller, most people have a difficult time trying to fathom precisely how vast the oceans are and that we base our notion of coverage on what familiarities surround us--that is to say: land.
- m4x 13y ago
  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
  - jarek 13y ago
    Presumably you've read the story of what went on in the AF 447 cockpit - do you suppose adding one more voice to the cacophony of warnings would really have helped? Two seasoned pilots that were in the cockpit didn't fully realize what was happening - there's no guarantee a remote overseer dealing with incomplete and inconsistent data would have either.
  - hga 13y ago
    That's demanding rather a lot from a human on the ground. The Boeing (and I'm sure others) design philosophy is "unsynchronized joysticks ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA", and if Airbus and Air France had use the normal synchronized yokes, the problem of the brain wedged junior pilot would have been quickly apparent. Can you think of other examples? BTW, it's guessed that iced up pitot tubes caused the autopilot to disengage. You're also assuming the pilots would listen to a kibitzer from afar while struggling to fix their plane. Plus a hell of a lot of expensive technology to support all that. And expensive kibitzers looking over the pilot's shoulders, which the latter wouldn't like.
Zancarius 13y ago
The problem is that accident events (or events leading to an accident) happen in real time, and the flight recorders record a lot of data from the flight controls and instruments. As others have pointed out in the comments for another story, what happens if their aircraft's orientation occludes the antenna or something breaks off? From what I've read of most accidents, the recorders work quite well and often continue working until cables are severed (in which case satellite communications wouldn't work either), in-flight fires consume the aircraft, etc. Technology will unlikely replace flight records, which have a proven track record (provided they can be found... but not as many have gone missing as you might think), but it can certainly augment it. I still don't think it's as good a solution to the "real time" problem as having the recorder on board the accident aircraft itself. Edit: Sibling comment from objclxt incidentally is the same user who illustrated the problems with satellite communications I alluded to. See objclxt's comment history for details.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Theodores 13y ago
Iridium? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation Beam up some coordinates every minute from an Iridium phone strapped to the roof. Pair it to an iPad to get those coordinates. Maybe have a second phone/ipad strapped onto the underside too just in case the plane ends up flying upside down.

GauntletWizard 13y ago

Flightradar24 has a fantastic primer on what tech is used to track aircraft, and what it's limitations are: http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works

denzil_correa 13y ago

There was another snippet from the article which was interesting. > A recent patent application filed by Boeing describes such a system, which specifies a limited data set including the precise location of the aircraft and the flight control inputs by the pilot or the automation system. Clearly, Boeing themselves are thinking towards continuous tracking of a flight.

melling 13y ago

The planes are traveling 8 or 9 miles a minute. If it goes down mostly intact (i.e. not a lot of debris), there's a lot of ocean that you'll need to search. Personally, I'd feel better if the plane simply pinged its location every few seconds to a satellite so rescue teams know immediately where to look. Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?

Zancarius 13y ago
> Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it? Apparently 2-3 kilometers according to [1], which I found in the comments from here [2]. [1] http://www.hydro-international.com/issues/articles/id1098-Air_France_Flight_AF.html http://www.hydro-international.com/issues/articles/id1098-Ai... [2] http://www.aticourses.com/blog/index.php/tag/side-scan-sonar/ http://www.aticourses.com/blog/index.php/tag/side-scan-sonar...
- melling 13y ago
  So, if the plane is traveling at 13 km a minutes and you have a 20 minute window, it's going to take a long time to find it. Doesn't the technology exist to detect low power signals from a much greater distance? The US military must be able to do it?
  - adanto6840 13y ago
    I'm more surprised that there isn't a single (imagery-related) satellite that would, over the last 24 hours or so, have taken imagery (or been able to be re-assigned to do so) of the area(s) of interest. If for nothing else than to rule out some areas / possible outcomes... But yeah, very far out of my realm of expertise, though I do hope to finish my PPL fairly soon & am an avid AVHerald & LiveATC follower! :-) http://www.liveatc.net/forums/ http://www.liveatc.net/forums/ http://www.avherald.com/ http://www.avherald.com/
    - Maxious 13y ago

pcurve 13y ago

In both Air France 447 and Malay Air MH370, local authorities found traces of crash / wreckage within 1-2 days. People don't fully appreciate how difficult it is to find anything in the middle of ocean when there's no visual trace. Even if you can narrow down the point of impact within a few square miles, you won't know for sure until you get underwater equipment. When you're dealing with deep underwater recovery, all bets are off. I think low-tech solution would be effective. Perhaps install a few dozen chemically activated florescent devices throughout the plane that would float.

yeukhon 13y ago
Yes. It took two years and multiple teams (including submarine) until Titanic team came and found the blackbox and the remains of the aircraft deep on the seabed.
AmVess 13y ago
It's difficult even on land. I recall an accident that involved a twin engine light aircraft that vanished in the middle of the night in Alaska perhaps 20 years ago. Search parties searched for quite some time, but gave up. Five years later, the plane was found in the woods some 100 meters away from a fairly frequently traveled two-lane road.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Forget Alaska, there are crashes in Nevada which haven't been found after decades. A large airliner would be easier to find on land though - just look for the glow.
  - crazytony 13y ago
    Aside from Alaska (which has some radar limitations due to the terrain) I'm pretty sure none of those accidents occurred after coast-to-coast radar coverage came in to force in the continental US. Believe it or not until 1973! there were massive land-based lighthouses all across the United States that would illuminate the aerial pathways that aircraft would use to get across the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airway_beacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airway_beacon

raverbashing 13y ago

We can and do track aircraft through several systems: ACARS, ADS-B reading position info through GPS (and others) Wifi and cell-phone have speed limitations (receiver transmitter), also, they are not adequate for something flying 500knots at 35kfeet However, it is true that systems could be upgraded and offer a bigger bandwidth (within a certain limit)

rayiner 13y ago

> There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. We have billions of dollars of equipment focused on tracking that rover, and we still lose contact with it sometimes.

judk 13y ago
Billions, really? Excluding the equipment used to send the rover to Mars?
- rayiner 13y ago
  The Deep Space Network:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/m/news/news.php?release=2013-370#.Ux1AqMvD_cc http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/m/news/news.php?release=2013-370#.Ux....
exodust 13y ago
we lose contact with the Mars Rover by design. There's a 3 hour window of communication each day. Outside of that window, the rover is on its own.

rjzzleep 13y ago

as i mentioned below, some engines already send flight data to satellites. ironically some of these newer engines also have much higher failure rates. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/airbus-engine-explosion-rollsroyce-fault-8677717.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/airbus-engin... http://atwonline.com/engines/final-qantas-a380-engine-failure-report-blames-faulty-rolls-royce-oil-pipe http://atwonline.com/engines/final-qantas-a380-engine-failur... http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/monitoring_systems.jsp http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/mon...

pavelrub 13y ago

I'm not convinced by your argument. I'm not sure what you mean by 'something catastrophic happens'. 'Something catastrophic' is the result of a certain chain of events. Telemetry data about those events can be sent before they lead to 'something catastrophic' that makes it impossible to send anything further. It is not as if the plane hits a meteor in mid flight and everything suddenly explodes with no prior indication of anything going wrong. And even if that's the case (as being accidentally hit by a missile during training - this happened before) - the lack of telemetry will also tell us something.

brandon272 13y ago
I'm not thinking of meteors when I describe a "catastrophic" event. I'm thinking of a fuel tank explosion like TWA Flight 800 or a missile hitting the plane or a bomb in the cargo hold going off or a stress fracture on the fuselage causing an inflight breakup. None of which have been ruled out on the Malaysian flight, I should add.
- pavelrub 13y ago
  Those "catastrophic" events represent a tiny percentage of flight crashes, and a black-box wouldn't help to properly diagnose them either. Your argument still doesn't make sense.

aortega 13y ago

> There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. We can track any commercial airliner on earth, but not under 5 Km of water.