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> "eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd

> "eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd find in a typical satellite smartphone, and a small parachute" So you've replaced a single point of failure (failure of the recording device) with 4: failure of the ejection trigger, failure of the ejection mechanism, failure of the parachute, and failure of the (significantly weaker) recording device. The point of a black box is that it's an when all else has failed device - there are extremely few assumptions you can make about such a situation, so the correct move is to design as conservatively as possible. The plane could be gliding. It could be a raging fireball. It could be missing a wing. It could be about to crash but all the sensors still think everything is just great.

aptwebapps 13y ago
Isn't anigbrowl suggesting supplementing the black boxes rather than replacing them?
morcheeba 13y ago
Don't be dense. That's not what at all he said & your math is all wrong. The existing black box is not a single point of failure. The big question is finding it ... that's what this whole concern has been over (and, since you missed it, why I joshingly call you dense). Anig also clearly stated that there would be 20 of these, operating in parallel. Your math is wrong because you ignore his central argument.
anigbrowl 13y ago
No. I want to keep the existing systems and add another system that's sufficiently cheap that it it can have a 95% failure rate and still be economical. I mean, here we are after 3 days and none of the surface vessels can find the possibly-debris stuff seen from the air earlier today. I don't have a design for a foolproof system and am under no illusions that the existing 'black boxes' could be easily replaced, but the existence of commodity-cheap sensors, processing, and communications technology mean we can afford massive redundancy.

aptwebapps 13y ago

Isn't anigbrowl suggesting supplementing the black boxes rather than replacing them?

morcheeba 13y ago

Don't be dense. That's not what at all he said & your math is all wrong. The existing black box is not a single point of failure. The big question is finding it ... that's what this whole concern has been over (and, since you missed it, why I joshingly call you dense). Anig also clearly stated that there would be 20 of these, operating in parallel. Your math is wrong because you ignore his central argument.

anigbrowl 13y ago

No. I want to keep the existing systems and add another system that's sufficiently cheap that it it can have a 95% failure rate and still be economical. I mean, here we are after 3 days and none of the surface vessels can find the possibly-debris stuff seen from the air earlier today. I don't have a design for a foolproof system and am under no illusions that the existing 'black boxes' could be easily replaced, but the existence of commodity-cheap sensors, processing, and communications technology mean we can afford massive redundancy.