| The black boxes are fine. ACARS/ADS-B are usually helpful, just not in this case, so far as we know. There is already a perfectly capable technology in place: the 406 MHz ELT. If it turns out the the (probably two) ELTs did not transmit, we need to think about why. Things can go bad quickly on a commercial jet. No one has time to manually activate the ELT before a sudden impact. At least one of the ELTs is required to activate automatically in case of an impact. A hard landing is enough. So why did at least one of the ELTs not activate? here are some possibilities: 1) It did, and we don't know about it. The media is so ignorant about the details of technological systems that they don't know the questions to ask, cannot understand the relevance of technical details, and would not understand the answers in any case. Welcome to the idiocracy. 2) An ELT activated, but was not picked up. Very unlikely. If an ELT activated aboard MH370, the satellites would almost certainly have received the signal and passed it on. 3) The aircraft hit the water intact, and the ELTs were destroyed before they could activate. We can't do anything about the stupidity of the media except to educate ourselves, stop consuming media garbage, and hope that, eventually, the human condition will improve. If option (3) is correct, then we can also do nothing. Any force sufficient to interfere with the safe operation of the aircraft by competent pilots should also have been sufficient to activate an ELT. If the ELT did not activate, it means that the aircraft was flyable. We cannot adjust the sensitivity of the ELTs to activate on flyable aircraft, because the rate of false activations would be unacceptable. Apparently, we also cannot eliminate the impact of flyable aircraft with terrain by pilot training; quite the contrary--the phenomenon seems to be increasing. Improved autopilots are also not the answer. Of necessity, an autopilot must relinquish control to human pilots in many circumstances where anomalous data is received. This is the circumstance in which it is most likely that the human pilot, taking control of a partially disabled aircraft, often at night and over water, will crash a flyable aircraft into terrain. There has been a growing series of such accidents. So, no, we do not need to rethink "black boxes". They do their job very well. We also do not need to rethink the ELT--it is a very reliable technology except when people crash a flyable aircraft. We may want to continue to upgrade the packet data rate between the aircraft and its base, but that is already the plan. We also cannot upgrade the autopilot, because we cannot yet create artificial intelligence that can deal with a chaotic system like a partially disabled aircraft. We may want to think about giving pilots better ways of seeing an overview of their situation. Mandatory AOA indicators and external-view situation indicators would be a great start. Probably also rethinking reflexive media coverage of aviation would be good. Our need to know immediately does not trump the well-thought-out engineering of commercial airliners, and pandering to our self-absorbed search for meaning and quick fixes, particularly when none is available, is likely degrade, rather than improve, the human condition. |