21st century instrumentation
The recent Air Asia crash and, rightly or wrongly, comparisons to AF447 set me thinking.
Modern 21st century electronics have made it possible for amazing advances to be made in nearly all spheres or our lives. Aircraft fall behind because the pace of innovation far exceeds the speed of the certification processes required. Consequently aviation lags by years which these days represents a massive leap, sometimes by several orders of magnitude. This shortcoming will certainly be compounded in the future, in almost as exponential a fashion as the electronics are improving.
Totally new methods of doing many things are now possible, with well entrenched processes being thrown out on their ear and replaced by some newer, simpler and more effective technologies.
Consider aircraft instrumentation, based on pitot static systems which are prone to icing and other failures.
Would it not be possible to mount sets of accelerometers and GPS receivers at each extremity of the aircraft (wingtips, nose, tail) and thus be able to calculate the aircraft's true attitude in space, which could be displayed to the pilots as a 3rd person view? Without any pitot static information?
Instead of the INS's being located in one part of the aircraft and thus only able to calculate the position of the aircraft as a whole, with an inertial unit at each extremity the position of each extremity could be calculated and thus pitch, roll and yaw could be discovered. Almost like the position of four aircraft flying in very close formation.
in a calamity such as AF447 instead of the pilots being presented with conflicting, incorrect data and various alarms, a picture of the aircraft (in this case) falling through space with high nose up attitude could be displayed, clarifying the situation to the crew.