8 ms·

An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear

61 points by Libertatea 12y ago

ganeumann 12y ago
"...a six-pound tracking system, about the size of a hotel safe, installed in the planes’ electronics bays...if something goes wrong — a sudden loss of altitude; an unexpected bank; engine vibrations — the system begins transmitting data to the ground, via satellite, every second. That six-pound box spits out reams of performance data, as well as the basics necessary for a search-and-rescue: coordinates, speed, and altitude....installation alone runs about $120,000 per plane..." Should this cost $120k? I'm no expert, but that seems steep. I assume this data is already being written to the black box, so piggybacking off that data feed seems like it would be a pretty simple thing.
- chrisfarms 12y ago
  Maybe you're paying for the guaranteed access to the satellite network when it's needed rather than the tech on the plane itself. ....and of course a bit of a "no competition so deal with it" charge.
- viggity 12y ago
  My neighbor growing up owned brokerage for refurbished aircraft parts (apparently there is a niche for everything). They'd refurbish some stuff in house but farmed a lot of it out. Anyway, one day he was giving me a tour of his office and they had a garage for storage in the back. He picked up this valve off the shelf, it was the size of an 80 count aspirin bottle. He said he bought it for $1200, spent another $900 to refurbish it and he was going to sell it for $5000. Absolutely mind boggling.
- nedwin 12y ago
  This is aviation engineering where everything needs to be checked and verified multiple times by multiple people because otherwise planes fall out of the sky.
- unimportant 12y ago
  Companies exist to make money, the market is very limited, the sales process is long etc. but feel free to compete. People generally dont try to replace a 100k job with another one when they start companies, but are looking for a (multi) millionaire upside instead
- brandon272 12y ago
  Airlines and regulators have no interest in slapping on crude, consumer grade transmitters to existing aircraft. As is the case with any aircraft part, it needs to be a high-grade, reliable, tested, and certified. When you start tying in transmitters to the aircraft's existing avionics, the need for a redundant, extremely reliable, tested and fault-free system is even greater. An absolute must. That's where the big expense comes in. And I believe that's what passengers have come to expect. Personally, I'd rather fly on an airliner without a satellite tracking system than fly with one that hasn't been subjected to the same testing and certification standards as the rest of the plane's equipment. The cost is the prohibitive factor. I can imagine that Delta, for instance, has no interest in a $90M charge to retrofit their aircraft with a system that they will probably never use.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    The money would probably be better spent speeding up ADS-B transmitter installations, as well as incentive payments to Iridium to get their new satellites with ADS-B receivers into orbit. No point in reinventing the wheel.
    - brandon272 12y ago
      I'm sure it's something that will be worked out in time. Perhaps the manufacturers themselves will be more interested in rolling out tracking technology in new aircraft versus airlines retrofitting existing planes. But it's not an industry that responds quickly due to media hysteria surrounding rare and isolated incidents, that's for sure.
    - cpncrunch 12y ago
      This is already being done, by Aireon.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Right, which is a subsidiary of Iridium: http://www.aireon.com/AboutAireon/AnIridiumInnovation http://www.aireon.com/AboutAireon/AnIridiumInnovation
- chiph 12y ago
  I imagine partly because the airline was buying from the "11-20" quantity column. If Delta were to buy, with 700+ planes, they'd likely get a pretty good quantity discount.
- VLM 12y ago
  A lot of the arguments in this particular thread are based on the assumption that an aviation grade (non-firmware locked to low speed / low altitude like some 90s models) an an antenna are somehow more expensive than $120K or more specifically that it would be more expensive than screwing around with the existing black box and flight avionics. Making it all even weirder, lets price out something that does an even more complicated task, a TCAS unit that ties into the avionics and A/V headsets and sometimes HUD and the transponder and in real time warns of potential collisions. $15K to $20K installed. But this vastly simpler project is supposed to cost about ten times as much. Don't think so. Also a lot of confusion about what a black box from 1980 vs 2015 actually records and what is necessary. Yes from a safety perspective a simple location tracker does nothing and you'd need a full black box feed. A classic programming example of not defining your goals means a fail. Have to spec if you just want a lat/lon or if you want a full engineering telemetry feed. Finally, if the engine controller fails, and you're over an ocean, then you die. Pretty simple. On the other hand, 99.9999999% (seriously) of flight hours, if this flight recorder fails, much like a tcas blowing a fuse, you simply fix it before the next flight. A big old "whatever". Its not like most planes disappear on a regular basis or most planes are involved in near collisions. The MTBF of the all hardware is shorter than the mean time between accidents. So consumer grade is good enough as long as it doesn't burst into flame like a consumer laptop.
minikites 12y ago
> Any new technology also requires new training of pilots and ground crew, and it opens new avenues for mistakes. I think this is the key point. This isn't iPhone level technology, this is closer to Space Shuttle technology, where things need to be tested to the extreme, radiation tolerant, and able to withstand the force of a literal plane crash.
- johansch 12y ago
  Meanwhile they allow hundreds of relatively high power RF transmitters (passengers' phones) onboard. I call humbug.
  - minikites 12y ago
    Right, my point is that this new device has to be tolerant of radiation from passengers' phones, increased radiation from space, etc
    - johansch 12y ago
      And what happens if it isn't? And how would be this be any worse than no device at all?
      - minikites 12y ago
        The device recording plane data is presumably connected to important plane systems to record them. Can data/electricity only flow one way? Are you sure?
        zaphar 12y ago
        Why? for location data all they need is GPS. If you know location you find the black box which has the telemetry data. Is there a reason a location tracker can't be self contained with it's own power supply and no connections to a plane's telemetry feed?
hengheng 12y ago
I don't like the tone of this article. Articles like this were written after each and every single crash, which eventually led to sharper requirements, more certification, added security gizmos and thingies and more safe-ropes in every single corner of the aircraft. Most of that was reasonable, but care must be taken when making systems more complicated and static by taking what seems to be the easy route of "just adding a fix". The reason why most of these systems seem anachronistic is not due to the high costs and financial pressure on the airline companies. Most systems seem so anachronistic because they have to be incredibly reliable and robust. Flight recorders are built to withstand about any disaster you can throw at them, which would be quite hard to do achieve with a modern cloud-enabled micro-electronic device. Even if we threw billions at the problem, it would most likely take five years to build a mass-deployable remote aviation telemetry system of the required quality level, just because making hardware is hard, and a half-assed solution helps nobody. It's particularly unlikely that a niche solution like the one suggested in the article works for everybody. Don't get me wrong -- added safety is always nice. But let's take a step back for the moment. Let us not just put another whole new box into every aircraft after every crash. Instead, let's try and make the smallest possible adjustment to what is a well-proven, existing system already. There have been reports after the MH370 loss that turbine telemetry data had been transmitted even after all other systems had failed. An small adjustment would be to lower the interval in which this signal was transmitted, down to say 30 seconds, provided the comm satellites are prepared to handle this. I'm not an expert on avionics, and I'm not claiming that this is the egg of Columbus, but surely there has to be a nice, small, lightweight and elegant solution, which incidentally is cheap on top of this.
- boxey 12y ago
  Agreed. People forget that in addition to the nominal cost of a new tracking system ($120k PER PLANE in the article, not including control center cost), just the weight alone costs about $3k/year for each 1kg added to the plane. Add the yearly communication service, maintainance, depreciation costs to this, and we're soon gonna be paying $3k/plane ticket. In contrast, since MH370, Inmarsat has changed the time period for handshakes with their terminals from one hour to 15 minutes. Cost: $0.
marcosdumay 12y ago
Notice that avoiding that the plane disappears does not save any life. That's why people do not care so much about it, and that's why they stil disappear. That said, good telemetry brings economical gains. Planes will stop disappearing in due time, just not by state decree, and probably because of more usfull devices than this one.
- mikeash 12y ago
  It doesn't save lives on the disappeared plane, but it may save lives in the future. If, for example, the cause of MH370's disappearance is something that could happen to others, and can be remedied at a reasonable cost, being able to find out what that cause is and how to remedy it would save lives in the future. A low priority, but not nothing.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Notice that avoiding that the plane disappears does not save any life. Analyzing the causes of plane crashes saves lots of lives. You can't do that with a disappeared plane.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    You usually get the black box upon recovery, which doesn't save the passengers, but does get you all the valuable data.
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      > You usually get the black box upon recovery, which doesn't save the passengers, but does get you all the valuable data. And recovery is only possible if you can find the wreckage. MH370 is still missing, and as such the cause of its crash is unknown. If we had real-time GPS monitoring of airliners, chances are we'd have wreckage in-hand.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        MH370 was rare. You typically have a small search space with a downed aircraft, and the black box announces itself acoustically underwater for up to 30 days.
ck2 12y ago
The ultimate system would ping home every minute, not wait for a fatal even which may cause loss of power or antenna. Certainly satellite data cost has come down to the point where you can track such expensive planes in real time?
danpat 12y ago
I deploy satellite-comm GPS tracking equipment on machinery in the ski industry. What I don't get is why airlines insist on bundling emergency telematics along with position tracking. It massively complicates what otherwise is a pretty simple problem. It feels like that description of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle out of the Pentagon Wars movie. With a box the size of a Big Mac, at <$1k per unit and about $100/month in data costs, you could deploy an off-the-shelf industrial grade tracking unit that would transmit location/speed/altitude every 10 seconds whenever the unit is powered. All it would need would be a power supply. This would neatly solve the "where the heck is the plane" problem, globally, for a fairly trivial cost. I realize that finding a spot on the plane to mount it, verifying aerodynamics, figuring out how to wire it in, testing, doing the work across a fleet and managing all that data all end up costing a lot more than the equipment, but given the costs being quoted for some solutions in the articles that have been coming up, it really seems like the airlines could have a big PR win by paying for it with petty cash out of their marketing/advertising budget.
- RobotCaleb 12y ago
  I'd like to talk with you. Could you hit me at my email in my profile?
  - danpat 12y ago
    Email sent.
- evilolive 12y ago
  Could you describe a bit which type of satellite communication you use for that the ski use-case, and what is available as off-the-shelf equipment ?
  - danpat 12y ago
    Sure. I run a small business (http://skitrails.info/ http://skitrails.info/) offering real-time GPS tracking of grooming equipment at ski resorts. The resorts use the data for operations management, and to prepare reports for public consumption (i.e. what's groomed). I'm mostly using cellular/mobile vehicle trackers (of which there are hundreds of vendors), but for regions where there's no cell/mobile coverage, we fall back to satellite options. With lots of optimization, it's only slightly more expensive for our use-case. Specifically, we deploy these units: http://www.skywave.com/en/our-technology/satellite-cellular-communication/idp-series/idp-600 http://www.skywave.com/en/our-technology/satellite-cellular-... which use the Inmarsat constellation. The specs probably aren't quite up to being attached directly to an airplane, but with the right housing and a heater, they're probably not far off. The trick for finding robust off-the-shelf gear is to look for industries that operate in remote regions, like oil and gas, and maritime. They also have fairly harsh operating conditions, so equipment sold there is usually fairly tough. Prices have really come down over the last 5 years.
zaphar 12y ago
I'm curious why a simple "Where am I right now" item that doesn't have to plug into the avionics and could possibly even have it's own power supply isn't sufficient to cover this. The biggest problem for both of those planes seems to be that we can't find them. Figuring out why they crashed is possible once we find them and can get the black box. The only really missing component is the location ping and it should be possible to completely isolate from the plane shouldn't it?
- Gravityloss 12y ago
  You can buy a box that attaches to anything you'd like to track. For example with magnets to a steel shipping container. It has its own battery and gps and a satellite phone. It notices from the gps when the container is moving and starts sending position updates with the satellite phone. You can specify the interval, that then decides how many years the battery lasts.
  - zaphar 12y ago
    So why isn't this a cost effective approach to the problem for airlines? You could even have a pool of them that you attach to airplanes that on overseas duty only to limit the costs.
tokenadult 12y ago
From the article: "In discussing about potential safety advances, Tony Tyler, the International Air Transport Association director general, said earlier this month that 'even though aircraft cannot be tracked in all cases, flying is safe. Over 100,000 flights operate safely every day.'" That's important baseline information. I would much rather fly on any of the airlines that serve the major airport in my town than drive here, and that's even though some website has just identified the drivers in my state, incredibly, as the safest drivers in the United States.[1] Airline flying as it is currently regulated and implemented daily is an astounding safe way to go to places near and far. [1] http://bringmethenews.com/2015/01/04/study-finds-minnesota-has-the-nations-safest-drivers/ http://bringmethenews.com/2015/01/04/study-finds-minnesota-h...
- grecy 12y ago
  No matter how safe something is, we should still be trying to make it safer.
  - jacalata 12y ago
    Rubbish. Perhaps you meant to say "Unless something is already completely safe, we should always be open to analyzing the benefits and costs of possible safety improvements, while being sure to spend the majority of our resources on areas that offer easier or larger gains".
cpncrunch 12y ago
I don't think this expensive solution is the answer. All airliners already have ADS-B transmitters...the problem is that over the ocean there are no ground receivers to pick up the signals. Aireon is launching a set of satellites that will pick up ADS-B signals from all aircraft, and will offer the service completely free of charge to any airline in the event they lose contact with a plane.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

61 points by Libertatea 12y ago

"...a six-pound tracking system, about the size of a hotel safe, installed in the planes’ electronics bays...if something goes wrong — a sudden loss of altitude; an unexpected bank; engine vibrations — the system begins transmitting data to the ground, via satellite, every second. That six-pound box spits out reams of performance data, as well as the basics necessary for a search-and-rescue: coordinates, speed, and altitude....installation alone runs about $120,000 per plane..." Should this cost $120k? I'm no expert, but that seems steep. I assume this data is already being written to the black box, so piggybacking off that data feed seems like it would be a pretty simple thing.

chrisfarms 12y ago
Maybe you're paying for the guaranteed access to the satellite network when it's needed rather than the tech on the plane itself. ....and of course a bit of a "no competition so deal with it" charge.
viggity 12y ago
My neighbor growing up owned brokerage for refurbished aircraft parts (apparently there is a niche for everything). They'd refurbish some stuff in house but farmed a lot of it out. Anyway, one day he was giving me a tour of his office and they had a garage for storage in the back. He picked up this valve off the shelf, it was the size of an 80 count aspirin bottle. He said he bought it for $1200, spent another $900 to refurbish it and he was going to sell it for $5000. Absolutely mind boggling.
nedwin 12y ago
This is aviation engineering where everything needs to be checked and verified multiple times by multiple people because otherwise planes fall out of the sky.
unimportant 12y ago
Companies exist to make money, the market is very limited, the sales process is long etc. but feel free to compete. People generally dont try to replace a 100k job with another one when they start companies, but are looking for a (multi) millionaire upside instead
brandon272 12y ago
Airlines and regulators have no interest in slapping on crude, consumer grade transmitters to existing aircraft. As is the case with any aircraft part, it needs to be a high-grade, reliable, tested, and certified. When you start tying in transmitters to the aircraft's existing avionics, the need for a redundant, extremely reliable, tested and fault-free system is even greater. An absolute must. That's where the big expense comes in. And I believe that's what passengers have come to expect. Personally, I'd rather fly on an airliner without a satellite tracking system than fly with one that hasn't been subjected to the same testing and certification standards as the rest of the plane's equipment. The cost is the prohibitive factor. I can imagine that Delta, for instance, has no interest in a $90M charge to retrofit their aircraft with a system that they will probably never use.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  The money would probably be better spent speeding up ADS-B transmitter installations, as well as incentive payments to Iridium to get their new satellites with ADS-B receivers into orbit. No point in reinventing the wheel.
  - brandon272 12y ago
    I'm sure it's something that will be worked out in time. Perhaps the manufacturers themselves will be more interested in rolling out tracking technology in new aircraft versus airlines retrofitting existing planes. But it's not an industry that responds quickly due to media hysteria surrounding rare and isolated incidents, that's for sure.
  - cpncrunch 12y ago
    This is already being done, by Aireon.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Right, which is a subsidiary of Iridium: http://www.aireon.com/AboutAireon/AnIridiumInnovation http://www.aireon.com/AboutAireon/AnIridiumInnovation
chiph 12y ago
I imagine partly because the airline was buying from the "11-20" quantity column. If Delta were to buy, with 700+ planes, they'd likely get a pretty good quantity discount.
VLM 12y ago
A lot of the arguments in this particular thread are based on the assumption that an aviation grade (non-firmware locked to low speed / low altitude like some 90s models) an an antenna are somehow more expensive than $120K or more specifically that it would be more expensive than screwing around with the existing black box and flight avionics. Making it all even weirder, lets price out something that does an even more complicated task, a TCAS unit that ties into the avionics and A/V headsets and sometimes HUD and the transponder and in real time warns of potential collisions. $15K to $20K installed. But this vastly simpler project is supposed to cost about ten times as much. Don't think so. Also a lot of confusion about what a black box from 1980 vs 2015 actually records and what is necessary. Yes from a safety perspective a simple location tracker does nothing and you'd need a full black box feed. A classic programming example of not defining your goals means a fail. Have to spec if you just want a lat/lon or if you want a full engineering telemetry feed. Finally, if the engine controller fails, and you're over an ocean, then you die. Pretty simple. On the other hand, 99.9999999% (seriously) of flight hours, if this flight recorder fails, much like a tcas blowing a fuse, you simply fix it before the next flight. A big old "whatever". Its not like most planes disappear on a regular basis or most planes are involved in near collisions. The MTBF of the all hardware is shorter than the mean time between accidents. So consumer grade is good enough as long as it doesn't burst into flame like a consumer laptop.

minikites 12y ago

> Any new technology also requires new training of pilots and ground crew, and it opens new avenues for mistakes. I think this is the key point. This isn't iPhone level technology, this is closer to Space Shuttle technology, where things need to be tested to the extreme, radiation tolerant, and able to withstand the force of a literal plane crash.

johansch 12y ago
Meanwhile they allow hundreds of relatively high power RF transmitters (passengers' phones) onboard. I call humbug.
- minikites 12y ago
  Right, my point is that this new device has to be tolerant of radiation from passengers' phones, increased radiation from space, etc
  - johansch 12y ago
    And what happens if it isn't? And how would be this be any worse than no device at all?
    - minikites 12y ago
      The device recording plane data is presumably connected to important plane systems to record them. Can data/electricity only flow one way? Are you sure?
      - zaphar 12y ago
        Why? for location data all they need is GPS. If you know location you find the black box which has the telemetry data. Is there a reason a location tracker can't be self contained with it's own power supply and no connections to a plane's telemetry feed?

hengheng 12y ago

I don't like the tone of this article. Articles like this were written after each and every single crash, which eventually led to sharper requirements, more certification, added security gizmos and thingies and more safe-ropes in every single corner of the aircraft. Most of that was reasonable, but care must be taken when making systems more complicated and static by taking what seems to be the easy route of "just adding a fix". The reason why most of these systems seem anachronistic is not due to the high costs and financial pressure on the airline companies. Most systems seem so anachronistic because they have to be incredibly reliable and robust. Flight recorders are built to withstand about any disaster you can throw at them, which would be quite hard to do achieve with a modern cloud-enabled micro-electronic device. Even if we threw billions at the problem, it would most likely take five years to build a mass-deployable remote aviation telemetry system of the required quality level, just because making hardware is hard, and a half-assed solution helps nobody. It's particularly unlikely that a niche solution like the one suggested in the article works for everybody. Don't get me wrong -- added safety is always nice. But let's take a step back for the moment. Let us not just put another whole new box into every aircraft after every crash. Instead, let's try and make the smallest possible adjustment to what is a well-proven, existing system already. There have been reports after the MH370 loss that turbine telemetry data had been transmitted even after all other systems had failed. An small adjustment would be to lower the interval in which this signal was transmitted, down to say 30 seconds, provided the comm satellites are prepared to handle this. I'm not an expert on avionics, and I'm not claiming that this is the egg of Columbus, but surely there has to be a nice, small, lightweight and elegant solution, which incidentally is cheap on top of this.

boxey 12y ago
Agreed. People forget that in addition to the nominal cost of a new tracking system ($120k PER PLANE in the article, not including control center cost), just the weight alone costs about $3k/year for each 1kg added to the plane. Add the yearly communication service, maintainance, depreciation costs to this, and we're soon gonna be paying $3k/plane ticket. In contrast, since MH370, Inmarsat has changed the time period for handshakes with their terminals from one hour to 15 minutes. Cost: $0.

marcosdumay 12y ago

Notice that avoiding that the plane disappears does not save any life. That's why people do not care so much about it, and that's why they stil disappear. That said, good telemetry brings economical gains. Planes will stop disappearing in due time, just not by state decree, and probably because of more usfull devices than this one.

mikeash 12y ago
It doesn't save lives on the disappeared plane, but it may save lives in the future. If, for example, the cause of MH370's disappearance is something that could happen to others, and can be remedied at a reasonable cost, being able to find out what that cause is and how to remedy it would save lives in the future. A low priority, but not nothing.
ceejayoz 12y ago
> Notice that avoiding that the plane disappears does not save any life. Analyzing the causes of plane crashes saves lots of lives. You can't do that with a disappeared plane.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  You usually get the black box upon recovery, which doesn't save the passengers, but does get you all the valuable data.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    > You usually get the black box upon recovery, which doesn't save the passengers, but does get you all the valuable data. And recovery is only possible if you can find the wreckage. MH370 is still missing, and as such the cause of its crash is unknown. If we had real-time GPS monitoring of airliners, chances are we'd have wreckage in-hand.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      MH370 was rare. You typically have a small search space with a downed aircraft, and the black box announces itself acoustically underwater for up to 30 days.

ck2 12y ago

The ultimate system would ping home every minute, not wait for a fatal even which may cause loss of power or antenna. Certainly satellite data cost has come down to the point where you can track such expensive planes in real time?

danpat 12y ago

I deploy satellite-comm GPS tracking equipment on machinery in the ski industry. What I don't get is why airlines insist on bundling emergency telematics along with position tracking. It massively complicates what otherwise is a pretty simple problem. It feels like that description of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle out of the Pentagon Wars movie. With a box the size of a Big Mac, at <$1k per unit and about $100/month in data costs, you could deploy an off-the-shelf industrial grade tracking unit that would transmit location/speed/altitude every 10 seconds whenever the unit is powered. All it would need would be a power supply. This would neatly solve the "where the heck is the plane" problem, globally, for a fairly trivial cost. I realize that finding a spot on the plane to mount it, verifying aerodynamics, figuring out how to wire it in, testing, doing the work across a fleet and managing all that data all end up costing a lot more than the equipment, but given the costs being quoted for some solutions in the articles that have been coming up, it really seems like the airlines could have a big PR win by paying for it with petty cash out of their marketing/advertising budget.

RobotCaleb 12y ago
I'd like to talk with you. Could you hit me at my email in my profile?
- danpat 12y ago
  Email sent.
evilolive 12y ago
Could you describe a bit which type of satellite communication you use for that the ski use-case, and what is available as off-the-shelf equipment ?
- danpat 12y ago
  Sure. I run a small business (http://skitrails.info/ http://skitrails.info/) offering real-time GPS tracking of grooming equipment at ski resorts. The resorts use the data for operations management, and to prepare reports for public consumption (i.e. what's groomed). I'm mostly using cellular/mobile vehicle trackers (of which there are hundreds of vendors), but for regions where there's no cell/mobile coverage, we fall back to satellite options. With lots of optimization, it's only slightly more expensive for our use-case. Specifically, we deploy these units: http://www.skywave.com/en/our-technology/satellite-cellular-communication/idp-series/idp-600 http://www.skywave.com/en/our-technology/satellite-cellular-... which use the Inmarsat constellation. The specs probably aren't quite up to being attached directly to an airplane, but with the right housing and a heater, they're probably not far off. The trick for finding robust off-the-shelf gear is to look for industries that operate in remote regions, like oil and gas, and maritime. They also have fairly harsh operating conditions, so equipment sold there is usually fairly tough. Prices have really come down over the last 5 years.

zaphar 12y ago

I'm curious why a simple "Where am I right now" item that doesn't have to plug into the avionics and could possibly even have it's own power supply isn't sufficient to cover this. The biggest problem for both of those planes seems to be that we can't find them. Figuring out why they crashed is possible once we find them and can get the black box. The only really missing component is the location ping and it should be possible to completely isolate from the plane shouldn't it?

Gravityloss 12y ago
You can buy a box that attaches to anything you'd like to track. For example with magnets to a steel shipping container. It has its own battery and gps and a satellite phone. It notices from the gps when the container is moving and starts sending position updates with the satellite phone. You can specify the interval, that then decides how many years the battery lasts.
- zaphar 12y ago
  So why isn't this a cost effective approach to the problem for airlines? You could even have a pool of them that you attach to airplanes that on overseas duty only to limit the costs.

tokenadult 12y ago

From the article: "In discussing about potential safety advances, Tony Tyler, the International Air Transport Association director general, said earlier this month that 'even though aircraft cannot be tracked in all cases, flying is safe. Over 100,000 flights operate safely every day.'" That's important baseline information. I would much rather fly on any of the airlines that serve the major airport in my town than drive here, and that's even though some website has just identified the drivers in my state, incredibly, as the safest drivers in the United States.[1] Airline flying as it is currently regulated and implemented daily is an astounding safe way to go to places near and far. [1] http://bringmethenews.com/2015/01/04/study-finds-minnesota-has-the-nations-safest-drivers/ http://bringmethenews.com/2015/01/04/study-finds-minnesota-h...

grecy 12y ago
No matter how safe something is, we should still be trying to make it safer.
- jacalata 12y ago
  Rubbish. Perhaps you meant to say "Unless something is already completely safe, we should always be open to analyzing the benefits and costs of possible safety improvements, while being sure to spend the majority of our resources on areas that offer easier or larger gains".

cpncrunch 12y ago

I don't think this expensive solution is the answer. All airliners already have ADS-B transmitters...the problem is that over the ocean there are no ground receivers to pick up the signals. Aireon is launching a set of satellites that will pick up ADS-B signals from all aircraft, and will offer the service completely free of charge to any airline in the event they lose contact with a plane.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]