News Contact lost with 777-200ER of Malaysia Airlines

Keatah said:
And they're not a fire hazard? Let us do the same thing with a satcom module of a sort.
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No, not at all. What do you expect there, a large battery and a hard drive? They are flash memory today, completely passive except the sonar pinger.

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In that report, you can see how a solid state FDR looks like, when opened, it is about the Analysis of the AAL77, which flew into the Pentagon.

http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/foia/9_11/AAL77_fdr.pdf
 
Urwumpe said:
Wrong - I think they will show much more interesting data, because the FDR will likely only confirm, what we already suspect from other observations.
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Totally agree

The old question (joke) was "why don't they build the whole aircraft like they build the black box of an aircraft?"
That's a joke but with a correct insight: black boxes are really made to survive and to save data from the most tremendous impacts, fires, underwater pressures... everything...
 
Keatah said:
This is still one big joke. And if it isn't known, let it become known, the aviation industry is 20 years out of date.

Why not track a flight real-time, you know, uplink operational parameters continuously to base. Transmit the black box data (or a subset of it) to the nearest satellite. They say it can't be done. BS. You got teenagers sending megabytes upon megabytes of useless facetime video cross country. You've got thousands upon thousands of commercial fleet vehicles doing this. Get with the program!

Why not have the black box pinger modulate itself with the data stored within? Better yet, when an aircraft deviates or gets in trouble, have it do a memory dump. This isn't rocket science.

Why not have the back box use a signal this more readily distinguished from other noise? Have it transmit a simple code nowhere found in nature. After all, the news just said they weren't sure if it was a real genuine signal they found. A simple matter of programming.

Have a camera in the cockpit that transmits real-time, or at least records all activity. Just one more way to reduce the cost of investigations.
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My original post to reply to this is would need to be put in the basement so I'll just point out some things.

1. It is possible to do as you suggest and have streaming flight data, but who would be responsible for storing it? who would have to pay for the infrastructure (New FDR,CVR,Satellite transmitters, Satellites, Receivers, Data centers, maintenance, ect. ) as I'm certain the existing systems would be stretched with the extra load.

2. Camera in the cockpit good idea but I would wrap it up with the CVR.

3. As some other people on the forum can better explain satellite communications is not evenly distributed, ie at some point during a flight an aircraft may need to change satellites, or to another provider which may be on significantly different frequency.

4. The existing set up is meant to be simple and robust, my understanding of how the data is stored, is that it is uncompressed raw sensor readings (I have no idea how much mb/s that is). If you are going to transmit it you are going to want to compress it, which adds the possibility of errors.

5. Adding data to the locater beacon, could you do it with out reducing the battery life or reliability of the beacon?
 
fred18 said:
Totally agree

The old question (joke) was "why don't they build the whole aircraft like they build the black box of an aircraft?"
That's a joke but with a correct insight: black boxes are really made to survive and to save data from the most tremendous impacts, fires, underwater pressures... everything...
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Yes - but also not do anything else. They are highly specialized systems to store important information under all conditions, that engineering can handle and which are thinkable and realistic in aircraft. Its hard to destroy a modern FDR, I would not even bet on letting a MBT fire at it to be reliable.
 
Keatah said:
About having cameras in the cockpit.
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But what for? The FDR already contains all data you could see from cockpit instruments (and more). And storing flight data requires much smaller datastream than a video feed. If someone enters the cockpit and hijacks the plane, you don't need a camera to tell you that.

Seriously, maybe before you start engineering impossible systems, you should look at where the real blame is, i.e. the Malaysian airforce. A plane switches off a transponder, diverts, flies in a national airspace for an hour or so, and nobody cares to intercepts it. The hypothetical hijackers could have flown it into Petronas Towers and nobody would notice until too late.

Mind-blowing.
 
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Urwumpe said:
Yes - but also not do anything else. They are highly specialized systems to store important information under all conditions, that engineering can handle and which are thinkable and realistic in aircraft. Its hard to destroy a modern FDR, I would not even bet on letting a MBT fire at it to be reliable.
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Again agree, but this get back to my previous point: aviation is so safe that they don't need to spend more in that, paying the NTSB ex post for 1 accident is cheaper than improve the recordings on 1 billion planes. Not that I agree with this, I just think that this is the reason
 
Hielor said:
Different people have different ways of coping with tragedies. Humor is a perfectly valid response.
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Yes, gallows humor and all of that. I understand, just not in the mood because these aren't people that we know nor is this a situation any of us could have prevented. Dying is the easy part, it's the ones left behind that are suffering and therefore we should show respect to the living... even if there are none of them that are part of this community.


Cameras in the cockpit? Why not? Flight crews are employees of the airline they fly for, who are employees of the passengers they carry. It's a private agreement and nowhere does it say that flight crews are not liable to be under scrutiny... of any kind. Of course the airline should be held accountable for the installation of said cameras. They can choose to have them or not, it is then up to the consumer to vote with his/her wallet.
 
Urwumpe said:
The pilots don't want it and they have the law on their side. Monitoring your employees with cameras is forbidden with only few exceptions.
*SNIP*
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(Bolding mine) Not in this country anyways. The unions will usually always oppose this (not an indictment on unions, some are good, some are bad, some are neither), but we're starting to see that put in place in our rail vehicles after the recent Metro North derailment. Frankly, I don't see the problem. If you're on the clock, you're subject to company requirements anyways, and company functions can be monitored. Now cameras in the bathroom is too far even if you're "on the clock," but most companies simply won't have the resources to sit a baby sitter in front of a monitor all day long watching your every move, but it would have been helpful to have the camera data livestreamed off-site in case its onboard storage is destroyed. That's become a problem actually with the aforementioned locomotive cameras, they get destroyed in the collision.
 
Ocean Shield had 2 more contacts yesterday for 5 and 7 minutes.
 
Zatnikitelman said:
Frankly, I don't see the problem. If you're on the clock, you're subject to company requirements anyways, and company functions can be monitored.
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We are a bit more touchy in Germany in that matter anyway, the question is, what you expect to see there. You need a good reason for that. Security comes into mind, but even then, you have to explain how cameras should improve this. Cameras are more used for monitoring machines than for monitoring humans here.

The important switch positions are all recorded, as are the voices in the cockpit. What can improve beyond this by use of a camera? Watching the pilot picking his nose during landing?

If you can't trust your pilots to work properly (as any employees), you have a much worse problem than just the cameras can solve. You need a different company culture.
 
tl8 said:
Ocean Shield had 2 more contacts yesterday for 5 and 7 minutes.
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Did that help narrow it down any?

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Urwumpe said:
We are a bit more touchy in Germany in that matter anyway, the question is, what you expect to see there. You need a good reason for that. Security comes into mind, but even then, you have to explain how cameras should improve this. Cameras are more used for monitoring machines than for monitoring humans here.
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Many airliners have cameras aboard already... they're just outside and above the cockpit door and aimed down and aft, so that the pilots can see what's going on outside the cockpit in case of a hijacking attempt. Whether or not that's recorded on the FDR, I don't know (I hope it is).
 
garyw said:
The absolute worst scenario is that the boxes are retrieved, the data downloaded and they find out that the circuit breakers were pulled around the time that the aircraft vanished and that the tapes just contain normal aircrew chat and flight data. If this is the case then I think everyone will feel a little cheated...
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Unfortunately it may happen, just with any investigation. You hunt high and low for that elusive piece of evidence that you think will validate your hypotesis and then KA-BOOM! The evidence is either inconclusive or blows your beautiful theories to kingdom come.

I think everyone in the business is prepared for that.
 
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_38"]British Airways Flight 38[/ame] comes to mind, It took them a long time to work out and prove that the fuel filter was to blame.
 
garyw said:
You can turn them off by pulling the circuit breakers.

http://leehamnews.com/2014/03/31/mh...may-never-be-found-says-ex-ntsb-investigator/
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Yes, but that requires a lot of "what-if" and critical actions to accomplish. I would sort this into the field of "conspiracy theory" until needed. After all, only the CVR (which only records the last 2 hours of flight) can be shutdown from the cockpit, while the FDR requires not just access to the crew cabin without causing suspicion, but also requires more than just pilot knowledge of the aircraft - only technicians should know this part of the plane, pilots only need to know that fires can happen there.

Should the FDR and CVR have been shut off and free of any data, its a reason to come back to it and wonder what happened in the plane.

I doubt the investigators will find any human remains - The abyssopelagic fauna is not seeing fast food often. A 35 ton whale is stripped of 90% of its soft tissue in 18 months there, human bodies possibly only last a few weeks (We rarely find wrecks in that part of the ocean quickly).
 
unfortunately, all we have for MH370 is a whole bunch of what-ifs and little evidence.
 
garyw said:
unfortunately, all we have for MH370 is a whole bunch of what-ifs and little evidence.
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Yes, but we also have a bunch of "what-did-not-happens". That's pretty encouraging. After all, after we have excluded everything else, what remains, regardless how improbable, must be the truth.
 
Urwumpe said:
Yes, but we also have a bunch of "what-did-not-happens". That's pretty encouraging. After all, after we have excluded everything else, what remains, regardless how improbable, must be the truth.
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Thank you, Sherlock. :lol:

But we have to be cautious as to what we accept and don't accept as some evidence is being disputed. The climb to 45,000ft for example.
 
garyw said:
Thank you, Sherlock. :lol:

But we have to be cautious as to what we accept and don't accept as some evidence is being disputed. The climb to 45,000ft for example.
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I also climb to 45,000 ft sometimes.... oh wait, bad Sherlock. :rofl:
 
Urwumpe said:
But what do you mean by 150 meters above sea level?
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I was talking of the plane being 150m ASL, and the fact that FDRs cannot be separated from that far with a plane being so low in altitude, if it ever broke in mid-air.

Thanks for the explanations, so that presumed third spot was one another thing media speak of with no real clue. Wouldn't be the first time, here in France ...
 
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