Why aren't black box flight recorders better?
afar.com
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Outside of that, the ADS-B requirement is a huge help in knowing where aircraft are and where they are going.
I'm sure that there are a bunch of factors in play, but tracking a plane seems like a relatively simple and a high priority thing to do, and relatively cheap compared to a total cost of a plane. GPS, satellite connectivity, battery backup and even in a case of a total explosion, at least you know the last location, speed and direction to try to find the wreckage.
If the captain of the titanic intended on sinking the ship without a trace, he most certainly would have succeeded as well.
A more apt comparison would be AF447, which took a few days before the wreckage was found. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
E.g.: disabling the tracking system could require accessing a section of the plane inaccessible while it's in flight. Combine that with a hardware interlock system that would prevent the plane from taking off when it's disabled, and that should be sufficient in the vast majority of cases to prevent 'lost' planes.
Is there ever a valid reason to disable the recorder/tracking systems in flight?
I can't be the only one thinking that in the situation where we postulate losing trust in the captain, whether tracking is switched on or not is a relatively minor issue, compared with - say - the captain deliberately flying the aircraft into a mountainside.
But parallel to that (and unfortunately-but-most-likely in lieu of): we simply shouldn't be losing large aircraft and having no idea what happened.
This results in a “don’t ask don’t tell” situation which can be even worse.
Maybe it doesn't nearly happen often enough to make this any kind of a priority?
Sub-total loss is presumably much more common and it’s useful there, but the adjustments to prevent it being disabled/make it more durable would be helpful there, too.
That seems to me like they might be at a sufficient level of durability already.
The recorders already to work really well for the purpose they're designed for.
The "bad actor in cockpit" plus "unexplained disappearance" scenario, for which they're not designed, simply doesn't happen often enough to be worthwhile worrying about.
Short version: flight recorders aren't broken, they don't need "fixing"
Long version: imagine you were to propose a major redesign to your employer's systems to attempt to diagnose unaccountable failures which based on historical data happen 0.00000018% of the time[0], what would be the response?
[0] back of napkin maths based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36284912
What’s the ratio like, 1:10000?
I've read that pilots sometimes remark that their focus is on saving their own asses, and if they do that, the passengers will be fine.
I'm 100% with you on the desire to not have ground-link control (and, for me, to keep two crew in Part 121 operations); I just figured I'd estimate the math.
I would not count the four flights in 2001, personally. Those are not suicide by flight personnel.
If you look at an average of say 25m flights per year since the year 2000, then you would have about 550mm flights. Even if you include the 4 tragic flights of 9/11 in the numerator, my 7 nines are very conservative.
I think CAT III C ILS have the lowest (theoretical) minimums at 0/0, although I don’t think that designation is actually used; so let’s just say CAT III in general has the lowest minimums.
Commercial passenger aircraft have redundant systems and you can disable almost anything as needed and still fly (up to a point of course) in case of emergency.
If I'm thousands of feet above the ground and the system keeping me in the air has some kind of fault, when I say "Hal, shut down that faulty system" I don't wan't the answer to be "I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that."
This would be a very bad idea.
Deadly aircraft incidents, while exceedingly rare given the number of flight hours that happen every day, often happen within seconds. If there is something that is causing an issue that requires communication to someone (who is likely doing something else) outside of the cockpit, you may not get to it in time. Safety of the passengers and crew is the number one priority, and the captain should not have anything forbidden from his or her usage.
The voice recorder needs power which is provide by the aircraft and is a rolling 2-hour recording. If there is an incident, the captain will pull the breaker to this system to prevent the recording from being overwritten after on the ground, or, in the worst case, aircraft destruction will cause the severance of power to the device for a similar effect.
The flight data recorder a very dependent on all the systems of the aircraft, it listens on all electrical buses, senses the position of controls, and records datapoints at a defined rate for a rolling two hours of flight time. It has a small battery system to capture what it can, but if you lose engine generation and your APU, you either gliding to a crash landing in the best case or you are just hosed and it will be literally seconds before you’ve reached the ground.
Both of these things are not read only, they continually rewrite their memory because it’s usually the last bit of flight data that matters. There are pushes to make a system that can allow for 18-20 hours of flight data, but everything moves slowly in avionics.
1- If the airline industry really had a problem about paying for a low bandwidth satellite data link for a 100MM $ aircraft, they could optimize things, such as using ground data links 90% of the time while switching to satellite only in the middle of the ocean.
2- If a pilot is suicidal, black boxes don't help either. It's like saying we don't a better car safety systems, if someone really wants to die they will smash their car to a tree. That's not why BBs exist. Even knowing that a pilot was the cause of a crash helps immensely in analysing their mental state prior to the event, you know, to prevent it from happening again.
That's realy the key there, you have a 100+Tons of metal and fuel with 100:300 people on board going close to the speed of sound. It NEEDS to be safe, but unfortunately, accidents happen. In such an event you HAVE TO know what happened, know if it was an accident or a voluntary action, the fault of equipment, software, procedure, pilot, ATC , anything really. Every procedure/safety system/training/design specification/ecc.. is literally written in blood from past mistakes.
If i know I shouldn't have left that pilot in the cockpit, great! I'll make sure no other pilot gets in that same mental condition.
One problem with flying inverted is the bottom of the airplane tends to accumulate junk - nuts, bolts, dropped tools, lunch boxes, dead mice, etc. Turning the airplane over means all that junk falls into the machinery, potentially jamming it.
Point being, in an unforeseen emergency, allowing crews to override the normal safety mechanisms may in fact save lives.
it took more than a year to find the wreckage of AF447 and the black box (as per both TFA and your wikipedia link)
I'm sorry, when did we decide this? As far as I can tell this is just one of a number of different theories on MH370s disappearance.
I mean there are lots of theories.
https://www.salon.com/2023/03/10/mh370-malaysia-plane-disapp...
My favorite is still the one about the fire caused by the windshield electrical heater. There is precedence on other Boeing 777s for this to have played out. It was a known problem.
If it really was a suicide drop into the ocean...why wait 8 hours...just...do it...
I am not an expert in the 777 electrical systems but the two minute delta between the last radio transmission - where there were no audial warnings and the pilots were calm - and the transponder ceasing to transmit seems unreasonable for a catastrophic event to take out these systems.
I'll bother to defend myself here -- we don't know what happened. It could have been hijacked, it could have been a CIA operation, it could have been many different things. That you conclude it was the captain doing a suicide run does smell of something strange, considering the plane was in the air for 8 hours before disappearing from satellite contact.
That's all I will say on this. Downvote me as much as you want.
The backhanded racism would have went: muslim + pilot = crash in building, not disappear in ocean. So clearly you're just trying to have a hot take here.
> If it really was a suicide drop into the ocean...why wait 8 hours...just...do it...
Even though someone might conclude that death is the preferable outcome for their situation, it doesn't mean that they won't experience an insane amount of anxiety and spend a long time reconsidering or even trying to talk themselves out of it just before pulling the trigger so to speak. They're humans until the end, with human reactions, you know?
Depressurizing the cabin to incapacitate the other crew is definitely a possibility and I think the leading theory for what happened. Like you say there is no proof either way - so we may never know with 100% certainty.
Days? I thought it was found after two years.
The radio operator of the Titanic was trying very hard to let everybody know where they were.
The black box can’t be disabled AFAIK.
The argument in favor of disabling tracking is that the equipment itself could potentially malfunction in a way that disabling it would be safer (if it were interfering with voice communications or transmitting an emergency code inappropriately).
I fly small planes and it is not unheard of for ATC to ask pilots to cycle the power on a transponder that isn’t responding as expected. I assume that airline grade equipment is more reliable, but the same principle applies
Part of Federal Express Flight 705's whole debacle was that the hijacker tried to pull the breaker on the CVR.
And the investigation into SilkAir 185 was hampered because the recorders had their power pulled as a apart of load shedding while trying to resolve issues onboard the aircraft.
What do you mean by "heard both in London and New York"? The Titanic was actively sending out distress signals via telegraph as it sank, but those signals weren't strong enough to reach land. They were picked up by other nearby vessels and relayed.
It would have been hard *not* to hear it on both sides of the Atlantic, even with the primitive receivers of the day.
And to answer the question about why we can't use lower frequencies on planes, part of the answer lies in antenna length, which is related to wavelength. Lower frequency = longer wavelength, which in turn means larger antenna (yes, I know this is a very broad generalization, and also not the complete/only reason). Look up the antenna required for 1Mhz.
You wind a loading coil on a plastic dustbin.
?? Is there a different meaning of telegraph than I’m familiar that works without direct connected wires?
I would wager that far more people believe in the suicide theory than an un-commanded decompression event.
That list does actually mention MH370 as a possible suicide, which would be the correct way to describe it. It also states that several other theories have been offered. That's the point. The internet armchair crash investigators seems to think it was definitely suicide. Some TV commentators think it may have been suicide. However there are other valid possibilities and we just don't know.
If you want to hear about alternatives there's a good book by Christine Negroni called The Crash Detectives that goes through it in some detail including the hypoxia possibility as well as the suicide line of thinking and the pros and cons of each theory.
All of that, combined with the fact the pilot had depression and tested the same flight path in a simulator, is pretty compelling evidence that someone was in control for the entire flight and yet didn't activate a distress beacon.
That makes it pretty hard to believe any kind of technical failure was involved.
A lot of the people who refuse to say it might be suicide are just following standard and deep rooted ethical journalism rules to avoid discussion suicide, based on an assumption it will encourage more pilots to do the same thing which could land the person who called it suicide liable for those future deaths.
Even if the TV journalist thinks it's suicide and is willing to say that, their employer's legal team will often order them not to.
"Six weeks before the aircraft’s disappearance, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah used his home simulator to fly a route that was initially similar to part of the route flown by MH370 up the Strait of Malacca, with a left-hand turn and track into the southern Indian Ocean, the ATSB said in its report."
It's highly likely that MH370 was the result of pilot suicide.
Though I assume the engineering and regulation means such a thing has a decade+ lead time and then would only exist on new planes.
MH370 had 4 ELT, 2 on life raft, 1 in cabin, and 1 mounted to aircraft. The latter would have activated on crash but it was designed for ground crash not ocean. It would have sunk with plane. The life raft ones are water activated but probably sunk. ELT are more meant for finding survivors and not the crash site.
There are ejectable beacons but they are probably not required. It would make sense to add one for water crashes.
MH-370 has flown into the uninhabited area of Southern Indian ocean, far away from any places where a shorter-wave signal would be easy to receive, due to the curvature of Earth. MH-370 apparently did not send any distress signals; if it did, these would likely be received and relayed.
If Titanic had sunk in the Indian Ocean, it would probably still be lost.
By sinking in the North Atlantic it was within radio range of dozens of other ships and ground stations. Carpathia got to it in 3 hours.
The part of the Indian Ocean that MH370 is thought to have gone down in is second only to the South Pacific in emptiness.
Satellites do pick up the signal, but the detection area is pretty wide, so sometimes it's just too many signals coming in all at once, overwhelming the satellite. ADS-B is also pretty chatty, so the data sizes are significant (compared, to, say AIS, which is a similar system for marine vessels).
It's gradually becoming better, satellites having more focused antennas able to gather signals only from unpopulated areas, and more computing power to filter noise out.
Even with something like Aireon (that piggybacks on top of many Iridium sats)?
Ironically, if the pilots had simply let go of the controls, the airplane would have righted itself.
I'm willing to bet that for every "miracle on the Hudson" there are ten or more "the pilots should have just let go of the controls and let the computer handle things, or trusted their artificial horizon after getting disoriented".
The number of FAA accident investigations that mention spatial disorientation is too great to be otherwise.
The computer needs reliable data. When the data is faulty, the logic fails. This happened with AF 447. One annoying aspect of that event for me is the obtuse ways the system communicated what alternate law was in effect. Two of three pilots became confused by the computers’ confusion. The computer itself had given up. The plane stalled all the way into the ocean, one of the more simple conditions to recognize and recover from. The captain quicky recognized the condition and solution, but he had arrived in the cockpit too late to compel corrective action.
The Human Factor – the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452080
If you adapt a car engine (like a VW Beetle or Subaru engine, both flat-fours and common lightweight GA power plants) then it just runs on ordinary 95 octane unleaded, the exact same stuff you put in your car.
[0] https://www.g100ul.com/ [1] https://www.globalair.com/articles/california-county-that-ba... [2] https://www.flyingmag.com/washington-bill-seeks-statewide-ba... [3] https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2023/march/16/a...
Sigh, I'd include a capacitor in the design so the box will record a few seconds after the power is cut off.
Necessary for what? I was thinking more along the lines of giving us more raw data to be able to better deduce where planes might end up post-crash.
That's not all though. The boxes cannot actually get any data. The data needs to be sent to the black boxes from other sensors throughout the aircraft. So if the power to the blackbox is cut, it's likely that there is no power to the aircraft in general. That means there is no point in continuing to record. If we do include batteries, those batteries need to be able to power all relevant systems on the aircraft itself.
Also, technically flight recorders already have batteries. But those batteries are usually reserved for the locator beacons. Not recording. They are also located outside the black box itself. (although they are attached together and installed as one device.
MH370 pilot disabled telemetry.
Compared to something like the Titanic, an airplane weighs almost nothing parts can easily end up far away from where it fell.
It did a ~160 degree turn (at a very high angle of bank) and flew along the border between Malaysia/Thailand border (probably assuming that military RADAR operators in both countries would assume the flight belonged to the other country). Once passed Malaysia, it then turned north to avoid Indonesia and flew along the Strait of Malacca. [1]
It doesn't show up on RADAR again, but we know it later turned almost directly south after passing the northern tip of Indonesia.
This route comes across as so calculated with the explicit intent of going missing, that it's really hard to justify any scenario that doesn't start with the equipment being turned off intentionally and maliciously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#/...
Choice: Are we optimizing the air travel system for (1) actual air travel outcomes for air travelers, or for (2) effects on human emotional buttons?
(I know, I know, lazy cynicism)
There was a proposal to also send this info real time, but that has been shotdown many times.
How tiny a percent of airline flight outcomes would be substantially improved by any sounds-good change to the Black Boxes?
Sticking with the status quo sounds pretty optimal to me.
(After several cool-sounding stories of crashes, the article comes to a similar conclusion.)
When they DON'T move at glacial pace you get the 737 MAX.
> “Boeing has agreed to pay $2.5bn (£1.8bn) to settle US criminal charges that it hid information from safety officials about the design of its 737 Max planes. The US Justice Department said the firm chose "profit over candour"”
I’d argue the existence of the 737 MAX was a response to the FAA moving at a glacial pace, if you want to look at root causes.
The 737 MAX exists because Boeing was getting their butts handed to them in the market by the Airbus A320 Neo due to its superior fuel efficiency.
Boeing engineers wanted to create a new clean sheet single aisle aircraft to replace the 50 year old 737 (+737 NG) design. However, Boeing management decided that it would take too long to design + get it past the FAA , so they pivoted to another 737 upgrade. Another factor in this decision was that upgrading the 737 would allow the airlines to transfer their pilots over with minimal training.
However, to keep the same "type" as a 737, Boeing had to keep the planes dynamics exactly the same as the previous model.
Simultaneously, Boeing went on a full on lobbying blitz to get the FAA to allow them to “self certify” aspects of the design. Boeing had a legitimate argument here, the ESEA had streamlined the type variant process years ago allowing Airbus to quickly iterate on their existing designs.
So congress/FAA finally relents and allows Boeing to bring stuff in house. However, in retrospect, this was done without the collaboration and checks that the ESEA and Airbus have implemented, ensuring that the process generates the correct results.
If the FAA I’ve been quicker to read the tea leaves and implement a collaborative model, I’d like to think that flies in the 737 MAX would’ve been caught.
If you read all the way down to "Direct Law", which is the most degraded of all the FBW modes, that's how a Boeing normally works.
The Airbus system really makes life quite easy in a lot of ways... the aircraft will fly the exact same at maximum and minimum weights, etc.
Carmakers can’t mass produce older designs meeting older standards without airbags using “the design was approved in the past” excuse, but that’s totally cool in aviation.
(BTW, my experience is that "the case could be made for X" is a polite way of saying "a valid technical argument could be made in favor of X...but in the bigger picture X is clearly the wrong theory / engineering choice / business decision".)
* That some of them recorded voice cabin sound for too short (which was fixed in later ones but there are still some old planes flying
* That the cockpit voice recorder recorded in a loop and someone forgot to pull the fuse after accident and it got overwritten.
And overall even those would add very little to investigation.
It has simply become good enough and still are incrementally improved.
It isn’t an entirely unfair gripe. The AF 447 debacle was down to “pilot error” officially. The cause of the crash was that one pilot was commanding the aircraft incorrectly and the other pilots weren’t aware because the dual controls in an Airbus dont mirror each other like in all other aircraft. The real question for me is how do you design critical control systems so poorly that one person can be flying the plane in a configuration they aren’t aware of (the stick on an Airbus will react differently to the same input differently based on conditions) , and the other two people in the cockpit aren’t able to even see this. This is a design issue.
Presumably they would have seen it if they had looked. But they didn't feel it.
Normally a full back stick command wouldn’t have stalled the aircraft, but because the airplane entered ALT2 mode automatically the stick allowed the pilot to do something that normally wouldn’t happen. If the pilot had done exactly what he did 5 minutes earlier, the exact same command would have not led to a crash.
In other words, the main control device for the aircraft can do something different depending on circumstance.
This would be like a car steering wheel becoming twice as sensitive when the speedometer malfunctions.
The idea is that, yes, the pilots were trained on this, so it’s their fault no matter how complex the system is.
- ADS-B can be broadcast on two frequencies (978 MHz and 1090 MHz). FAA requires aircraft operating above 18000 feet to use 1090, while either may be used by craft flying lower. (It seems like the equipment is less expensive). This means 1090 is used more heavily by large commercial craft and so 1090 is the only band the satellites currently listen to.
- Smaller private craft sometimes use belly-mounted antennas and so their hull can block signal propagation upwards
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
Space based ADSB only improves coverage for mountain ranges and oceans. It's mission in a mountainous situation is to fill the gap when radar coverage is lost but you have low altitude (in relation to ground, not sea level) traffic, such as arriving and departing traffic.
assuming this map is accurate, you can appreciate how aircraft below 15,000 ft would be constantly falling in and out of ADS-B coverage if they themselves were changing altitude.
But the ocean is an other matter entirely, water is great at absorbing radio waves, and when a plane crashes and breaks up over deep waters the currents can carry far and disperse wide.
Fuck the world doesn’t have to be like this.
This Byzantine maze puzzle of inherited wealth and hopeless inequality and every part of it does feel inevitable and it feels naive to the point of stupid that anything could be reformed.
But I try to remember that it’s all pretty made up north of the actual physics. We put up with this because we’re collectively agreeing to.