[brandon272]

I'm seeing a lot of armchair criticism aimed at the air travel industry about how these aircraft should be able to be tracked more effectively given "modern technology" and they reference things like broadband in cars, WiFi on flights, etc.

What they seem to ignore is that many of these things only work effectively on land in populated areas. Drive your car out to the South China Sea and let me know how well the in-car broadband works and if you are able to send and receive an SMS using your phone.

There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth. Our ability to track something is a lot easier when things are going right. When something catastrophic happens, whether to a 777 out over the ocean or a rover on Mars, suddenly tracking the objects becomes a lot more difficult.

That said, perhaps there are technological innovations that could allow us to more easily pinpoint and track black boxes from downed airliners. I'm just not sure what they are. Any ideas?

[pcurve]

In both Air France 447 and Malay Air MH370, local authorities found traces of crash / wreckage within 1-2 days.

People don't fully appreciate how difficult it is to find anything in the middle of ocean when there's no visual trace.

Even if you can narrow down the point of impact within a few square miles, you won't know for sure until you get underwater equipment. When you're dealing with deep underwater recovery, all bets are off.

I think low-tech solution would be effective. Perhaps install a few dozen chemically activated florescent devices throughout the plane that would float.

[AmVess]

It's difficult even on land. I recall an accident that involved a twin engine light aircraft that vanished in the middle of the night in Alaska perhaps 20 years ago.

Search parties searched for quite some time, but gave up. Five years later, the plane was found in the woods some 100 meters away from a fairly frequently traveled two-lane road.

[alexeisadeski3]

Forget Alaska, there are crashes in Nevada which haven't been found after decades.

A large airliner would be easier to find on land though - just look for the glow.

[crazytony]

Aside from Alaska (which has some radar limitations due to the terrain) I'm pretty sure none of those accidents occurred after coast-to-coast radar coverage came in to force in the continental US.

Believe it or not until 1973! there were massive land-based lighthouses all across the United States that would illuminate the aerial pathways that aircraft would use to get across the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airway_beacon

[gonzo]

Steve Fossett died in 2007, flying just outside NV. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett#Death

[jccooper]

"By September 10, search crews had found eight previously uncharted crash sites,[54][55] some of which are decades old,[56] but none related to Fossett's disappearance."

Wow.

[crazytony]

He was found a year later not decades later.

To be clear though: I was talking commercial operations which generally operate above the radar plane. I'm not even sure how/if Fosset's plane would appear on radar as he had no ADS and he didn't file a flight plan which means he was in class G or possibly E airspace on a VFR mission (very low altitude).

[yeukhon]

Yes. It took two years and multiple teams (including submarine) until Titanic team came and found the blackbox and the remains of the aircraft deep on the seabed.

[sliverstorm]

local authorities found traces of crash / wreckage within 1-2 days.

Yeah, but our attention spans only last about 12 hours! You expect us to wait that long!?

[kevingadd]

Aren't satellites an obvious choice for this sort of thing? The link doesn't need to have the kind of low ping you expect for online games, and for low-latency communication they can use radio/radar - but that seems like it would have enough bandwidth for black-box style data, wouldn't it? Or does satellite communication generally suffer from problems with cloud cover, etc, even at the altitudes commercial airliners fly at?

Though, once the black box is in the ocean with the rest of a plane's wreckage, I can't imagine satellites would help :)

[objclxt]

I pointed this out somewhere else, but satellites aren't particularly helpful because you won't be able to transmit to them when you most need it, which is when there are problems with the plane. It's still highly likely that you're still going to end up with planes going 'off the grid' so to speak.

You could lose power, stopping you from transmitting telemetric data. Or there could be a cabin depressurization or breach that cuts off the antennas (or destroys them entirely). I'm not denying there are benefits to streaming telemetric and flight data continuously for non-major mechanical failures and general analysis - but when we're talking about a catastrophic event that brings down a plane?

In such an event you're going to be sending people to look for the wreckage anyway. Whatever data you're streaming isn't going to tell you the whole story - it'll end up looking exactly like the data does today: perfectly normal, and then nothing. I can see that in a 24 hour news cycle people want to know what happened when it happened. It perhaps understandably freaks people out to learn planes can just 'disappear' without explanation. But streaming telemetric data isn't going to help with that, because the only way we can stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area) is with satellites, and they're simply not reliable enough for it to be worth anything.

[Zancarius]

> because the only way we can stream such data over oceans (which make up most of the world's surface area)

I think this hits an important point that's lost in the media scuffle that inevitably ensues.

Because modern travel has made the world so much smaller, most people have a difficult time trying to fathom precisely how vast the oceans are and that we base our notion of coverage on what familiarities surround us--that is to say: land.

[m4x]

Real time telemetry via satellite could definitely be useful in some situations. The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it. That was one of the worst crashes in history and there was never even a problem with the plane. All they needed to save the flight was for somebody to point out that the plane was stalling due to a bad control input by one of the pilots.

There are certainly cases where the telemetry link would fail as the aircraft ran into trouble, rendering it useless, but there are undeniably cases where it could save hundreds of lives

[hga]

That's demanding rather a lot from a human on the ground.

The Boeing (and I'm sure others) design philosophy is "unsynchronized joysticks ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA", and if Airbus and Air France had use the normal synchronized yokes, the problem of the brain wedged junior pilot would have been quickly apparent.

Can you think of other examples?

BTW, it's guessed that iced up pitot tubes caused the autopilot to disengage.

You're also assuming the pilots would listen to a kibitzer from afar while struggling to fix their plane. Plus a hell of a lot of expensive technology to support all that. And expensive kibitzers looking over the pilot's shoulders, which the latter wouldn't like.

[m4x]

I agree that a better fix would have been to have synchronised joy sticks, but that doesn't negate the usefulness of telemetry

I'm aware that the pitot tubes iced over, but they de-iced long before the point of no return

And I bet the pilots would have listened to a 'kibitzer'. The senior pilot actually told the junior one to stop pulling up, knowing it would cause problems, and would presumably have taken control more forcefully if he'd been aware that the junior pilot had resumed pulling up after bein asked to stop. He just didn't know. Better communication, syncd joysticks or telemetry could all have helped make him aware of that.

[jarek]

Presumably you've read the story of what went on in the AF 447 cockpit - do you suppose adding one more voice to the cacophony of warnings would really have helped? Two seasoned pilots that were in the cockpit didn't fully realize what was happening - there's no guarantee a remote overseer dealing with incomplete and inconsistent data would have either.

[mpyne]

> That was one of the worst crashes in history and there was never even a problem with the plane.

There were many problems with the plane, including the physical one of the pitot tubes freezing up (despite heating elements installed to prevent that), and the software and design problems relating to silent disengagement of parts of the auto-pilot, silent transfer to different flight modalities by the auto-pilot, and poor affordances in the physical user interface itself.

Certainly the subsequent pilot error did not help, as the flight would have been recoverable if proper action had been taken, but it wasn't just the pilots either.

Either way if you think some random shore sider would have been able to identify the exact pilot fault and clue them in within time parameters even with the inherent latency of satellite comms you more faith than I do.

[ekianjo]

> There were many problems with the plane, including the physical one of the pitot tubes freezing up

Not many, a single problem actually. Plus, the plane was not crashing after the issue occurred and the autopilot was off. The crew misinterpreted the signals and did not pay attention the Stall alarms repeatedly. The plane was flying fine even without the autopilot, it's a case where the crew actually crashed the plane by themselves.

[gvb]

a) Nobody on the ground knew AF447 was in trouble. The aircraft never broadcast a declaration of an emergency.

b) Even if there was telemetry that sent the aircraft control inputs and instrumentation to the ground, with thousands of aircraft in the air, nobody would have been watching AF447's telemetry, waiting for Something Bad to happen.

c) It was about four minutes between when the aircraft got in trouble and when it impacted the ocean. Even if the aircraft declared an emergency and someone was able to pull up the telemetry for that flight, it is highly unlikely they would have been able to identify the cause before the aircraft impacted.

Ref: http://visual.ly/air-france-flight-447-crash-timeline

[m4x]

So ask yourself why it never broadcast a declaration of emergency - the autopilot had disengaged due to an instrument malfunction, which should have generated an automated broadcast on the spot. Then somebody could start monitoring the telemetry from the the one (or five, or some other low number of planes) that were in trouble of some sort.

It would also be quite simple to be running a bunch of automated tests on the telemetry from every plane in the sky and flagging anything out of spec. AF447 fell into the ocean. It's pretty fucking simple for a computer to monitor the altitude of a plane and say "one of your planes has significantly deviated from it's target altitude".

And "highly unlikely they would have been able to identify the cause" seems highly unlikely. The plane was stalled, and somebody was pulling up as much as possible. Is it really hard to imagine a pilot on the ground being unable to spot what was going on?

Even the captain on board figured it out quickly once he was summoned - the problem was flagging the issue/asking for help was done solely at the pilots discretion and they chose not to tell any body what was going on until it was too late

[ekianjo]

> It's pretty fucking simple for a computer to monitor the altitude of a plane and say "one of your planes has significantly deviated from it's target altitude".

Look, read the AF447 case again and the reports of what happened in the cockpit! The pilots were not EVEN listening to the different alarms being triggered in the cockpit and did not realize that they were in danger no matter how many instruments they had indicating major issues in front of them. In such situations what would make you think they would give a shit at what an automated message coming from a land operation would tell them ?

[tzs]

> The Air France crash could have been prevented if somebody on the ground had taken a look at the data from the plane, realised that the junior pilot has been pulling up the whole time, and made the crew aware of it

There are something like 10k commercial flights in the air at a given time around the world. How would that somebody on the ground know to look at that particular plane's telemetry?

[jarek]

This is the least difficult part of the whole scheme. A program looking at all incoming data and picking out extraordinary data (in AF 447's case, for instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human operator to inspect would help greatly. There'd be a lot of false alarms but still vastly less work than looking at telemetry of every plane ever. (And even if - 10k is around the number of employees of one mid-size airport - hardly undoable if you wanted.)

[ekianjo]

> A program looking at all incoming data and picking out extraordinary data (in AF 447's case, for instance the stall warnings) to flag for a human operator to inspect would help greatly.

Look at what happened in flight AF447. Everything occurred in a matter of minutes. Even if what you mentioned were to be in place, there would be virtually no time for an operator to do anything about it. And probably such operators would have to go through textbook questions because such regulations would be imposed on them by the FAA.

That's why we have several pilots in every aircraft, to mitigate the risk of human failure. Having more operators outside of the plane are not going to help much. If you want to put more engineering power, it's more software in the plane that is the right way to go for safety, as demonstrated so many times before.

[judk]

There are millions of web page changes on the Internet every day. How would a Google engineer know to look at one particular page to update the index?

[fnordfnordfnord]

By constantly comparing incoming data to known-good historical flight data and flagging instances that fall outside the norm?

[SnowProblem]

But if you were broadcasting location and velocity at all times, even if an aircraft lost power, you could project where the "unplanned water landing" would occur. That seems helpful.

I wonder if Google's Project Loon [1] would be of any use here.

[1] http://www.google.com/loon/how/

[Zancarius]

The problem is that accident events (or events leading to an accident) happen in real time, and the flight recorders record a lot of data from the flight controls and instruments. As others have pointed out in the comments for another story, what happens if their aircraft's orientation occludes the antenna or something breaks off? From what I've read of most accidents, the recorders work quite well and often continue working until cables are severed (in which case satellite communications wouldn't work either), in-flight fires consume the aircraft, etc.

Technology will unlikely replace flight records, which have a proven track record (provided they can be found... but not as many have gone missing as you might think), but it can certainly augment it. I still don't think it's as good a solution to the "real time" problem as having the recorder on board the accident aircraft itself.

Edit: Sibling comment from objclxt incidentally is the same user who illustrated the problems with satellite communications I alluded to. See objclxt's comment history for details.

[Theodores]

Iridium?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation

Beam up some coordinates every minute from an Iridium phone strapped to the roof. Pair it to an iPad to get those coordinates.

Maybe have a second phone/ipad strapped onto the underside too just in case the plane ends up flying upside down.

[GauntletWizard]

Flightradar24 has a fantastic primer on what tech is used to track aircraft, and what it's limitations are: http://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works

[raverbashing]

We can and do track aircraft through several systems: ACARS, ADS-B reading position info through GPS (and others)

Wifi and cell-phone have speed limitations (receiver transmitter), also, they are not adequate for something flying 500knots at 35kfeet

However, it is true that systems could be upgraded and offer a bigger bandwidth (within a certain limit)

[rayiner]

> There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth.

We have billions of dollars of equipment focused on tracking that rover, and we still lose contact with it sometimes.

[exodust]

we lose contact with the Mars Rover by design. There's a 3 hour window of communication each day. Outside of that window, the rover is on its own.

[judk]

Billions, really? Excluding the equipment used to send the rover to Mars?

[rayiner]

The Deep Space Network:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/m/news/news.php?release=2013-370#.Ux....

[rjzzleep]

as i mentioned below, some engines already send flight data to satellites. ironically some of these newer engines also have much higher failure rates.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/airbus-engin...

http://atwonline.com/engines/final-qantas-a380-engine-failur...

http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/mon...

[melling]

The planes are traveling 8 or 9 miles a minute. If it goes down mostly intact (i.e. not a lot of debris), there's a lot of ocean that you'll need to search. Personally, I'd feel better if the plane simply pinged its location every few seconds to a satellite so rescue teams know immediately where to look. Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?

[Zancarius]

> Btw, what's the transmission range of a black box? If it's 10,000 ft down, how close do you have to be to hear it?

Apparently 2-3 kilometers according to [1], which I found in the comments from here [2].

[1] http://www.hydro-international.com/issues/articles/id1098-Ai...

[2] http://www.aticourses.com/blog/index.php/tag/side-scan-sonar...

[melling]

So, if the plane is traveling at 13 km a minutes and you have a 20 minute window, it's going to take a long time to find it.

Doesn't the technology exist to detect low power signals from a much greater distance? The US military must be able to do it?

[teamonkey]

The black box pinger isn't really designed to locate a crash site, IIRC, it's to locate the black box within a crash site that could cover several square kilometers.

[adanto6840]

I'm more surprised that there isn't a single (imagery-related) satellite that would, over the last 24 hours or so, have taken imagery (or been able to be re-assigned to do so) of the area(s) of interest.

If for nothing else than to rule out some areas / possible outcomes... But yeah, very far out of my realm of expertise, though I do hope to finish my PPL fairly soon & am an avid AVHerald & LiveATC follower! :-)

http://www.liveatc.net/forums/

http://www.avherald.com/

[Maxious]

You can look at Landsat imagery for some of the search area http://www.geosage.com/Special/Landsat8_Flight370.pdf

[Zancarius]

> Doesn't the technology exist to detect low power signals from a much greater distance?

The pingers are sonar (well, sonic, but detected with sonar), with all the limitations that implies.

[pavelrub]

I'm not convinced by your argument. I'm not sure what you mean by 'something catastrophic happens'. 'Something catastrophic' is the result of a certain chain of events. Telemetry data about those events can be sent before they lead to 'something catastrophic' that makes it impossible to send anything further. It is not as if the plane hits a meteor in mid flight and everything suddenly explodes with no prior indication of anything going wrong. And even if that's the case (as being accidentally hit by a missile during training - this happened before) - the lack of telemetry will also tell us something.

[brandon272]

I'm not thinking of meteors when I describe a "catastrophic" event. I'm thinking of a fuel tank explosion like TWA Flight 800 or a missile hitting the plane or a bomb in the cargo hold going off or a stress fracture on the fuselage causing an inflight breakup. None of which have been ruled out on the Malaysian flight, I should add.

[pavelrub]

Those "catastrophic" events represent a tiny percentage of flight crashes, and a black-box wouldn't help to properly diagnose them either. Your argument still doesn't make sense.

[denzil_correa]

There was another snippet from the article which was interesting.

> A recent patent application filed by Boeing describes such a system, which specifies a limited data set including the precise location of the aircraft and the flight control inputs by the pilot or the automation system.

Clearly, Boeing themselves are thinking towards continuous tracking of a flight.

[aortega]

> There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth.

We can track any commercial airliner on earth, but not under 5 Km of water.