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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

Royls Royce sends performance data of its jet engines over satellites.

https://youtu.be/_30T6MqdSlw?t=43m19s

Wasn't that used to try to track that Malaysian plane that got lost?

Yes, via Inmarsat data.

>Given the cost of an aircraft and the value it represents, surely the data cost is more than worth it.

How does broadcasting to a satellite reduce current or future costs?

As an initial thought, being able to much more accurately locate missing aircraft sounds like it would be a cost saving. eg:

* the many months/years of effort + associated resources for searching would be likely reduced

* technical/procedural weaknesses that led to aircraft loss could be better analysed, hopefully leading to reduced further aircraft losses, reduced loss of life

Realtime data (other than location) sounds like it would have uses too. Not just alerting for impending or actual failure.

On the other hand, would doing this open up potential remote vulnerabilities for aircraft systems? That could have long term crappy-ness attached. :(

>On the other hand, would doing this open up potential remote vulnerabilities for aircraft systems? That could have long term crappy-ness attached. :(

Why should it?

If the software that does the sending has vulnerabilities in it, that would be bad.

Although we can all think of approaches to try to minimise/exclude that possibility... reality often has ways of showing up things people didn't think of. :(

What software would that be that the flight recorder box is running? I've always wanted to know. I've heard the OS Is some variation of a Linux distro

Not in the 1980's.

Why would a transmit-only device expose any vulnerabilities in its software? It shouldn't have the physical capability to receive any remote signals, much less act in any way in response to them.

Depends on how "transmit only" is done. If it's using the equivalent of UDP and no encryption of the data, then you're likely correct.

But if the "transmit only" has anything that receives data - even just ack signals for what's sent, let alone something to negotiate encryption - all bets are off. :(

You're thinking a few OSI layers too high. Any such radio communications from similar systems have one-way broadcast as the physical layer.

If you don't include a radio receiver, then there is no capability to receive a single bit, much less negotiate encryption; the system throws out a waveform and the rest of the world may figure out what to do with it if they manage to receive it.

Thanks. :)

The point of this data is to understand why planes crash (or how were hijacked) so that design faults, defects and crew procedures can be altered to prevent them happening again.

It's a cheap win on the customer service front, when a plane goes down.

> It's truly mind boggling that airlines don't do this.

They don't do it because they don't need the data. Governments do, for when they need to do search and rescue. So, governments should make it a requirement.

For a manager making a decision in an airline whether or not to use this service, he would have to justify the cost to the airline. If none of his competitors are using it, then he's just got an unnecessary cost which the airline has to eat or pass on the cost to the customer.

The way around this is to make it a requirement for all airlines. Then everybody has to eat the cost.

You may not be aware but there is an effort in the United States to move aircraft from primarily radar-based Air Traffic Control to GPS-based. This requires all planes to be equipped with additional equipment to transmit their location, and there is a mechanism to transmit via satellite. It's just not a requirement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...

> This requires all planes to be equipped with additional equipment to transmit their location

ADS-B (out) is not required for all planes, even after 2020. It's only required in class A, B, C, and some E, basically "wherever transponders are required today".

There will be a significant fraction of the GA fleet that will not equip.

Except ADS-B is a shit show. Watch this video [1] and tell me if you really want to still trust it over radar.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk

For Center (high-altitude en route) operations, ADS-B is fantastic. Random, direct routing becomes much more possible, because there's an electronic box giving people the warm fuzzy feeling. (The "it's a big sky" theory would also work perfectly well here, but people feel better with a semblance of active control.)

There are no plans to shutdown all ground radio based systems. Right now, to file a flight plan in "bad" weather, either your intended airport or your alternate airport must have a legal approach that does not require GPS.

Governments should just bill the manufacturer and the airline for the costs of the search and rescue/recovery operation. Then the manufacturers, airlines, and their insurers could work out what the cost/benefit equation is.

That would fix the economic incentives, but not the larger externalities. After all, many black boxes are never recovered[1], including the Eastern Airlines one at issue (well, it might have just been recovered, decades late) and, so far, MH370's. To an airline, this outcome is not the end of the world, or perhaps even preferable: abstractly, data from the flight recorder might help prevent future crashes, but that's far in the future, the crash rate is already very low, and in the near term, whenever info about the crash makes it into the news cycle, that's bad PR for the airline. But the government has a strong interest in getting that data: if it was terror, that information can help catch the masterminds and prevent future attacks; if it was an accident, well, government regulatory bodies are the embodiment of the public's collective interest in safety, which is considered more important than short-term profit. On top of that, typically, people who knew the victims have a very strong emotional interest in learning what happened, no matter whether any practical benefit can be derived from the knowledge.

If there was some realistic dollar amount that would guarantee recovery of existing black boxes, then sure, bill the airline for it and let them weigh the probabilities. But there isn't. The only way to prevent these types of situations from happening again is by upgrading the technology, and that has to be done in advance.

Of course, that doesn't mean we are supposed to disregard the cost of reducing externalities; nobody wants a bankrupt industry. Me, I'm not familiar with the economics of aviation, so I don't know whether the airlines should, or whether the government should require them to, make those upgrades in the near term. But at the very least, both of those statements will be true someday (due to turnover, technology improvements, etc.), and economic benefits won't have much to do with it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecovered_flight_r...

They should also install cockpit video recorders. A lot of accidents will be much easier to reconstruct what went wrong with such. For example, it could confirm who was at the controls, and if there was a struggle going on.

Typically plane crashes are very rare events. Even more rare are crashes from crusing altitude over water. MH370 doesn't change that.

So if the proposal is to add new equipment to every aircraft in service, that is compared to the very rare cost of having to recover a data recorder, and the even more rare cost of having to recover it from underwater. Airlines don't see that as an economic tradeoff that makes sense.

It doesn't seem to be on Elon Musk's radar (no pun intended) but if his or Amazon's reusable launch platform really does make commodity launches possible then it would make sense for Elon or someone to put up Iridium 2.0. Maybe Google or Facebook will do it to bring internet to the masses.

SpaceX are working on a low orbit constellation to provide low latency satellite internet (for consumers). Presumably that could serve the purpose of an "Iridium 2"?

Oh I stand corrected then. In my opinion between a lower cost competitor to BGAN, extending higher speed internet to undeveloped and underdeveloped areas I believe there is a great deal of pent-up demand. That's before things like mandatory internet-connected aviation transponders as mooted elsewhere in this thread.

Iridium NEXT satellites, to be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will be hosting Aireon’s ADS-B payloads.

http://aireon.com/2016/06/01/harris-completes-production-of-...

There is currently a company called Globalstar seeking permission from the FCC to offer satellite based internet services. The stock dropped 60% last week on rumors that they won't be approved but nothing has been confirmed.

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