Air France flight data recorder recovered | Hacker News Reader

Air France flight data recorder recovered

bbc.co.uk

59 pointscolinprince26 comments

I understand why in a world of easily destructible tape memory, there was only one, non-replicated flight data recorder memory. And it must've been quite heavy.

I don't understand now why in an aircraft strewn with various datalinks, there aren't a dozens or more inexpensive, lightweight easily findable flashdrives as datarecorders. You could place these at the wingtips, in the tail, in the landing gear, in all sorts of places that are known to survive.

What's the average age of a commercial aircraft? Average lifetime?

The aircraft involved, http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20090601-0 was built in 2005. The wiki tells me flash drives first became available in 2000.

Perhaps my question is why aren't today's aircraft built with this sort of much more redundant system?

Aircraft already have redundant hydraulics, redundant data, flight controllers, fuel tanks, engines, wheels, pilots, .... Why not have "inexpensive" redundant data recorders?

Doesn't matter. They're able to retrofit other things (from seats to in-flight entertainment systems) because aircraft have relatively modular designs and because individual subsystems may need to be replaced or upgraded for safety reasons.

This kind of technology is already deployed on a limited basis in a lot of commercial aircraft. An increasingly common business arrangement is for the airline to buy the aircraft but lease the engines (which are the parts requiring the most frequent maintenance). Rolls-Royce has a global infrastructure for telemetry data designed to shorten maintenance cycles and increase safety: see http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/12/09/336006/rr-tr... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communications_Address... for background.

I wonder if your inexpensive flash drive operates at - 60 °C...

Or being submerged for days in salt water.

I believe the cost of installing reliable data drives will be significantly minuscule compared to the actual price of the aircraft and their inherent value of holding extremely valuable data.

Wait, you actually thought he meant going to Wal-Mart and buying 1GB flash drives?

Somehow I doubt that is what the poster meant and you are just building a straw-man argument to gain points.

Insulating, heating and protecting against shock should not be harder for a flash drive than insulating, heating and protecting against impact of a tape drive with lot of moving parts inside.

More practically, I suspect the problem is the amount of time and energy taken to prove and certify a new way of doing things. Flight data recorders are standardised across most of the world and I suspect agreeing and certifing the number/location/design is more difficult than actually changing the hardware.

It's not all about economy. Flight systems are pretty complex and once cannot just have recording devices positioned everywhere (that's sorta like R2D2 plugging in some obscure data port and breaching into the death star). Black boxes are meant to resist temperature, pressure, elements and shock while keeping data secure enough for a long time until the box is recovered.

There was an excellent program on how black boxes are made and tested on Discovery or NatGeo (can't remember which), but this was the next best thing I could find http://www.yourdiscovery.com/video/discovery-news-what-does-...

My guess is that we'll see this more and more, at least storage in the various components such as glass displays, air data computers etc. Lots of data is already stored for performance/maintenance purposes, which is why they were able to get some helpful data over satellite link before the plane went down.

However, everything installed on a plane needs to be certified for good reason, and unfortunately that makes even the simplest modifications expensive.

I don't understand why flight data cannot be transmitted to a ground recording station in (near) real time, eliminating the need for expensive post-crash searches for the on-board recorders. I know that sometimes aircraft are out of radio/radar contact, but satellite coverage should be nearly ubiquitous. If airlines can offer in-flight internet service, surely they could be streaming their flight data back to a server somewhere.

Some data was transmitted in real-time to the Airbus maintenance facility. That's how we know (for example) that the pitot tubes appear to have failed, that the autopilot disengaged, it switched to alternate flight laws, etc.

Of course, satellite comm requires various things like intact antennas pointing the right direction. On-board recording does not.

It actually is made with flash memory:

http://www51.honeywell.com/aero/common/documents/Flight_Data...

You shouldn't trust major media outlets with getting the technical details right...

It is unbelievable that it was found and that the search never ended. You can watch a video about this flight on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html

"French search teams last week found the outer casing of the so-called black box recorder, but not its memory."

(EDIT: This is incorrect, sorry. The article is poorly worded. Would you rather I delete this comment?)

...And they just found the memory unit (which is designed to detach from the recorder in the event of a collision) today. A picture of the actual memory unit in question: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/01/world/europe/01...

Ahhh. Thank you for clarifying the article. That's amazing!

Indeed. Looking for the proverbial needle in a huge haystack is a piece of cake compared to what was done there.

IIRC, they actually had some very low level signal from the recorders two years ago that they didn't actually take notice of, and later, working on this data they finally extrapolated the probable position of the wreck after a tremendous data mining work.

Whoa. If you can find any links whatsoever about that, then I'd love to read them.

That reminds me of how Gauss was able to use very limited information to locate Ceres after it had moved behind the sun.

It's been quite hard to find information about the re-analysis. It looks like there was a press-release in May last year where the pingers were identified after a re-analysis of the Emeraude towed-array sonar tapes:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/air-france-crash...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/europe/07crash.html?...

Sadly, there are no references to source material, and a quick search through the BEA at http://www.bea.aero/ (the French aviation accident investigation agency) didn't provide immediate satisfaction, alas.

Now I remember that actually a friend working in the French submarine industry talked me about this. I don't know if I've got any other source.

Having watched the NOVA episode, it'll be very interesting to see if this data can confirm their suspicions.

"we're sorry but this video is not available in your area due to rights restrictions". There's money to be made from everything.

Does the article say that they found the cover of the second recorder but the data on the 1st? Thought the wording was ever so slightly ambiguous

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2503677

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