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Comment by belltaco | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they can use a service like Starlink to stream voice, location and blackbox data to a secure location on land, that way even if the flight is lost or destroyed we would know what happened, or even where the heck it is(looking at you MH370).

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Yeah, they can use Starlink to stream it across X, then store it (distributed, hashed, salted, and encrypted) in Tesla on-board storage. Only gold verified X users would get to access it without FAA permission.

I'm serious when Musk is in play people actually throw out their brains just get some virtual upvotes. Or just make incredibly stupid jokes.

SpaceX is US military contractor with very high security clearance. Starlink is literally used in war against nation state attackers.

It's not Musk, per se; it's that Musk is conflicting with The Narrative(TM), thus is a target. At least HN is better than Reddit, which is jam-packed with human NPCs, who react in similarly predictable ways without intelligence.

A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of 2021 that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see.

If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way; as NPCs. At least GPT AI can produce useful and interesting output.

I actually think Starlink is a super cool project, even if I wish someone else was in charge of it. I'm grateful that Musk managed to make electric cars "cool", and that his personality will make them more acceptable to conservatives that might otherwise have a knee-jerk resistance, and I think that Tesla actually did a lot to push the technology and the economy of electric cars. I think it's wonderful that we're investing more into space, even if, again, I would prefer someone else to be in the drivers' seat.

I absolutely recognize Musk's contribution to things that I value and respect.

I also think it's a little absurd how often he's brought up in completely unrelated discussions. It's a little like how whenever someone mentions that at-home electricity storage is a bit of an open question, people bring up flywheels, even though Powerwalls are a much more reasonable approach, just because they think flywheels are rad. The amount of times people try to shoehorn a Musk-related technology, (or even say "Hey let's get Elon on this, I bet his infinite money and brains could solve e.g. food distribution with um drones and Starlink and Boring Company I don't know he'll figure it out) makes it a little hard to take his biggest proponents seriously.

Why starlink? Planes typically use Inmarsat which provides better coverage.

Various aircraft data are already uploaded in flight ("stream" would be an exaggeration though) as you can see from the MH370 example you cited. The data uploaded are increasing as companies like Rolls-Royce become more of a data company.

The black boxes are pretty robust (assuming you can find them!) and uploading the voice data is probably not worth the cost.

> Planes typically use Inmarsat which provides better coverage.

Ask the families of MH370 how well Inmarsat works.

If the pilot can disconnect Inmarsat, he can disconnect Starlink. He might even be able to disconnect Twitter and in-flight entertainment.

But we would have the communications and real time location till the disconnect happened. In case of MH370 and Alaska 737 those are lost. That would give us clues as to what happened.

We know where MH370 disappeared thanks to ADS-B, and after it was disconnected, it was still seen by primary radars.

Okay and where are the pilot comms till it was disconnected?

No need to be confrontational, I'm not opposed to FDR/CVR streaming. I just dislike solutions to problems that have already been solved, and we were just pointing out that starlink does not bring anything to the table vs. ADS-B, radars, and inmarsat.

(1) Starlink for airplanes is very expensive. Multiply that by many many thousands of planes and its $$$$$$$$.

(2) With that many planes you start to get into Starlink bandwidth issues. Cant it support that many? I honestly don't know

(3) Its a new complicated piece of equipment that may fail. What if the transmitter is broken? Blackbox systems are much simpler

(4) A lot of this data is already transmitted (speed, altitude, position, etc, just not voice), so no need to build a system for it.

There are many other system other then Starlink you could also use. And most airlines already have these installed anyway. And if a new plane costs minimum 25 million $, and most cost 50 million $ or more, a few 1000s to safely record data seems reasonable.

Bandwidth issue for a bunch of audio files? I think we can figure that out.

> (3)

I don't think a single person would suggest we replace the Blackbox. This would be in addition, not instead.

> (4)

I'm sue the plane produces lots of data that isn't transmitted. It would generally be smart to transmit far more data then we currently do and I'm not sure those methods are up to large increases.

But if they are, then yes that would be good.

For the cost - you are talking about the capex. Starlink would go under opex, and thats where the margins lie. You can probably make the numbers work, but no one wants to touch this.

For bandwidth - there are typically around 10k planes in the sky at any time, and that number typically grows. Thats 10k audio files streaming at a time, all day, every day. Add to that the nominal Starlink traffic that already causes bandwidth issues and you end up with probably non-trivial bandwidth issues until there is larger scaleup

Passengers can get a decent network connection on planes these days, no need to make a totally new system. But it's best effort; I'd still want a local copy that's a separate system from the uploaded audio.

The captain would likely also have disabled starlink and pulled the circuit breaker in the case of MH370, I wouldn’t be surprised if the VCR and FDR reveal nothing once we find them.

Maybe, but the recordings until that point would still be available, so we would atleast hear what happened to the copilot and what did they say etc.

How is that worse compared to now where we don't even know where the plane is? Just the underwater search cost $200M, with no results. Would've costed more if they didn't give up so easily.

MH370 is maybe not a good example, but AF447 is a good one.

Only if it's on a blockchain. *checks calendar* oh sorry, it's not 2021.

Currently it’s fairly common that a lot of flight data is logged during the flight, and transmitted to a server via 4G when on ground.

It doesn’t help when the aircraft gets destroyed, but it does create fairly big databases for analysis and preventive maintenance.

Why not just record more than 2 hours? Maybe two days worth of audio instead?

Indeed, the proposal is for 25 hours, and its not like recording 25 hours of audio is fundamentally more complex than 2 hours these days.

Because onboard recordings are prone to loss or destruction, intentional or otherwise.

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