Comment by password11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by password11 | Hacker News Reader

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> The incident was first reported by The Air Current, which analyzed granular data supplied by Flightradar24... UA1722 took off at 00:49.28.882 UTC on 19 December (14:49 local time 18 Dec). It climbed to a maximum altitude of 2,200 feet at 00:50:39.007 before descending to 775 feet at 00:50:57.500. The aircraft recovered from its dive and resumed its climb and safely arrived in San Francisco at 05:03 UTC.

God, what a beautiful world we live in. Even in the event of a catastrophic aircraft failure, rest assured that millisecond-granularity data of your last moments will be recorded, as you plunge into the sea.

Wouldn't want it any other way.

Edit: Wow, I guess a lot of people disagree with this or think I'm being sarcastic. I'm not: I honestly think aviation telemetry is cool, and I left this comment expressing that if I was involved in a crash or near-crash (such as the one we're all discussing), I would think it's cool that the exact flight trajectory was recorded in such detail.

> Even in the event of a catastrophic aircraft failure, rest assured that millisecond-granularity data of your last moments will be recorded, as you plunge into the sea.

If you're close enough to shore that an ADS-B receiver can record your planes' transmissions.

Post MH370, ADS-B data is relayed by Iridium satellites:

> Aireon has deployed a space-based air traffic surveillance system for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) equipped aircraft throughout the entire globe. Aireon is harnessing next-generation aviation surveillance technologies that were formerly ground-based and, for the first time ever, is extending their reach globally to significantly improve efficiency, enhance safety, reduce emissions, and provide cost savings benefits to all stakeholders. Space-based ADS-B surveillance covers oceanic, polar, and remote regions

Very true, although latency is much greater, so you may not get the last (hundreds of) milliseconds, as you would with ground-based receivers.

Why not? That data would still be transmitted, it would just take a little longer to receive..

Yes, excellent point. For some reason, I had in my head that an ack was necessary.

I guess the positive takeaway is that every death makes aviation safer for the future because we almost always learn from the data.

FWIW commercial aviation is already far safer than driving and the telemetry allows us to call out incidents like this and get to the bottom of what happened.

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