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Comment by tqkxzugoaupvwqr | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that planes, afaik, do not continuously broadcast their position and health. If you don’t find the black boxes, you can’t figure out what happened. The investigators of MH370 were so desperate for any information of the possible flight path, they had to turn to the pings the jet engines sent to the manufacturer as part of their monitoring [1]. All we need is for passenger planes to broadcast regularly and in short intervals. No indiscriminate high-resolution global monitoring and data processing needed.

[1] https://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2014/03/25/mh370-la...

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Airlines will track planes every 15 minutes starting in November. http://time.com/5137172/mh370-missing-plane/ Some airlines have already met this goal.

I’m stumped as to why they would pick such a ridiculously low sampling rate. Crashes often play out in minutes, wouldn’t it make more sense to have sub-minute resolution? Or is sending a location ping more complicated than I think?

In places without terrestrial ADS-B receivers, you’re relying on space based bandwidth constrained networks to pipe the data to ground stations.

The goal is just to narrow down the search area after a crash. Even at 700 MPH you can only cover 175 miles in 15 minutes. That's a pretty tractable area to search for a blackbox ping. And that's if they have no other info about the crash.

100K square miles is a pretty big area to search. Actually more than that since a plane cruising at 30K feet could glide quite far if it maintained some airframe integrity.

Yeah the search area would be about the size of New Mexico. But a larger area than that was searched in one day, Wednesday March 19 2014. http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/malaysia-MH370-sea...

By way of counterexample, note we knew pretty well where AF447 crashed and it still took almost two years to locate the wreckage on the sea floor.

I'm completely spitballing because what few articles I looked at didn't really answer that question. I'd wager it comes down to money. If events like MH370 are extremely rare then how much money is worth spending on it? If an event like MH370 happened tomorrow and we knew where it crashed how likely is it to change the outcome?

I'm not trolling and I don't know the answer to that last one. But I'm assuming the general consensus is that it wouldn't change anything - a plane would be down and everyone would still be dead. So instead of mandating an expensive overhaul of everything that can feed more data constantly I assume they're probably trying to make some already in place tech fill the gap and it has limits. I am entirely speculating on that though. But when in doubt, something usually comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.

People need to "feel" safe is one answer. Dead, yeah but they'd know the reason and so on. No one wants their loved one lost without a trace.

Also the money spent is nothing in the grand scale of aviation.

The obvious advantage is post-crash analysis to prevent it from happening in the future.

"But I'm assuming the general consensus is that it wouldn't change anything - a plane would be down and everyone would still be dead"

When you know the exact crash site, you can send help more accurate and therefore faster to save people, as airplanes can sometimes make a emergency water landing...

And in general I don't quite get it. GPS exists, so does Sattelite communication. And sure, for one private person it is quite expensive, but for an Airliner??

> "airplanes can sometimes make a emergency water landing..."

But in those events the planes have transponders/beacons that will tell you where they are. Remember with MH370 the pilot disabled it and then, to the best our knowledge, pointed the plane at the water.

Considering that every android phone (literally billions of units) sends a location update every 5-10 minutes directly to Google, and nobody cares about the cost, why would airplanes transmitting continuous location updates be too costly?

Android phones stop sending location updates when they go out of cellphone reception.

A solution that can continue sending updates from any point on earth costs a lot more than one that only works in range of cellphone networks.

While true, if the airplanes already send 15 minutes updates, the infrastructure is already there. It seems logical simply increasing the ping frequency should not lead to a proportional increase in cost.

Someone up-thread said that it's a progressive target, it'll be brought down to 1 minute intervals by 2021.

The article said that as well. Although, oddly, it says "when they're in trouble.."

>New aircraft must broadcast their locations every minute when they’re in trouble, but only from January 2021. A gradual tightening of requirements starts in November, when airlines must track planes every 15 minutes under regulations adopted by the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization.

There's already in many areas a requirement for aeroplanes to provide ADS-C via Inmarsat satellite updates at 15 minute intervals so that makes it easy to regulate (just increased cost making it global) https://www.aviationtoday.com/2015/09/25/ads-c-makes-increas...

The in distress technology isn't locked down yet but one option is increasing the capabilities of the existing distress beacons standards http://insidegnss.com/the-cospas-sarsat-meosar-system/

This is the only missing modern airliner in memory. Black-boxes and the existing electronic traces of their communications have been enough to find pretty much every major commercial crash for the last 50 years.

In reality tracking commercial airliners in real time is less useful for improving safety than better black boxes that collect more data.

The article says it is going down to once a minute starting in 2021.

It's in the article:

"Under the rules taking effect in 2021, a plane would switch to one-minute tracking automatically when systems detected it was in distress because of turbulence, mechanical difficulties or an unexplained change in course, such as during a hijacking or if the crew became unconscious.

Pilots couldn’t turn the system off after it activates automatically, ICAO said. The system would deactivate itself once the plane was flying safely again.

However, a pilot could turn off the system if it was manually activated.

The challenges tied to minute-by-minute tracking include adding computing power and internet bandwidth to process larger volumes of data. The tighter system also may require reserving more space on the flurry of satellites being launched to satisfy demands for constant internet connectivity."

You can't actually get that far in 15 minutes even at full speed, so 15 minutes is a high enough resolution to at least enable search parties to find the black box, which will hold much better data than can be transmitted anyway.

This sounds like space based ADS-B. https://aireon.com/ http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/ArticleNews/story/GAM/2...

The problem here is more that it was the middle of the ocean... gotta have line of sight to transmit.

The jet engines were using satellite communications to ping the manufacturer.

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