[anigbrowl]

All this is true, but perhaps we should also be exploiting cheap and redundant systems that leverage more up-to-date technology, eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd find in a typical satellite smartphone, and a small parachute - something you could build with a unit cost under $5k, which you could easily make back without a drastic impact on ticket prices. If you deployed, say, 20 of them automatically during a catastrophe, odds are that a few of them would survive.

I'm not disputing anything you wrote above, but right now all our eggs are in two very expensive baskets (FDR/CVR). When a plane goes mssing you want to pinpoint the location of the crash ASAP and get some telemetry as a second priority. The existing systems are great but could we not also benefit from some cheaper and simpler systems that didn't rely on being bulletproof?

[potatolicious]

> "eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd find in a typical satellite smartphone, and a small parachute"

So you've replaced a single point of failure (failure of the recording device) with 4: failure of the ejection trigger, failure of the ejection mechanism, failure of the parachute, and failure of the (significantly weaker) recording device.

The point of a black box is that it's an when all else has failed device - there are extremely few assumptions you can make about such a situation, so the correct move is to design as conservatively as possible. The plane could be gliding. It could be a raging fireball. It could be missing a wing. It could be about to crash but all the sensors still think everything is just great.

[anigbrowl]

No. I want to keep the existing systems and add another system that's sufficiently cheap that it it can have a 95% failure rate and still be economical.

I mean, here we are after 3 days and none of the surface vessels can find the possibly-debris stuff seen from the air earlier today. I don't have a design for a foolproof system and am under no illusions that the existing 'black boxes' could be easily replaced, but the existence of commodity-cheap sensors, processing, and communications technology mean we can afford massive redundancy.

[aptwebapps]

Isn't anigbrowl suggesting supplementing the black boxes rather than replacing them?

[morcheeba]

Don't be dense. That's not what at all he said & your math is all wrong.

The existing black box is not a single point of failure. The big question is finding it ... that's what this whole concern has been over (and, since you missed it, why I joshingly call you dense).

Anig also clearly stated that there would be 20 of these, operating in parallel. Your math is wrong because you ignore his central argument.