Originally Posted by
lemme
I had responsibility for both flight data recording and communications while at Boeing, continuing most of my career on communications. One area we, as an industry, have been seeking is telemetry for use in both operational quality assurance and for air-safety investigation. Like it or not, the public has little tolerance for the glacial pace of aviation evolution, especially in the area of accident investigation.
Mode S transponders and ADS-B open up an new generation of analysis unrelated to air traffic control or collision avoidance.
Public companies like flightradar24.com have crowd-sourced a very comprehensive set of data and make this available in real-time. Not only can we examine the flight of interest, we can look at all the other flights too. This adds a whole new dimension of insight.
Our planes, even older ones like the RJ85, are spewing streams of data that can be harvested for forensic and a lot of other purposes. And much of it, like ACARS and ADS-B is sent totally in the clear with little authentication to prevent spoofing, interception or hacking. I can see where security is being added as an afterthought in some of these protocols. In the meantime we amateurs can track Air Force One and Tyson One going south for the holidays.
Originally Posted by
lemme
I was lead engineer (control laws) for Boeing automatic flight controls, Thrust Management, for 757, 767, 747-400 and am very familiar with airplane systems. If you fly those planes, or 777 or 747-8, you are using thrust management, data link, flight data recording, and satcom systems I once led, or are directly based on developments I played a principal role in.
As supervisor for data link and satcom, I led the ability to for satellite voice and for ACARS/FANS to connect pilot and controller, to which I spend considerable time dealing with human factors and having to invent "comm messages" as a whole new category.
Many of us here have used those systems over the years, thanks for your efforts. Trying to do a user interface for messaging and ATC with the installed base of text screen user terminals and FMS boxes must have been a challenge.
Originally Posted by
lemme
Having examined a lot of data throughout my career, I have found that it is far easier connect the dots when you know what happened.
And, here on PPRuNe, we have sometimes found the smoking gun in an accident investigation long before the report comes out a year or two later. Or, at least, some of us think we have.
In the 1997 SilkAir 185 crash a poster here correctly gave the probable cause within a few days. Was PPRuNe still an e-mail list back then? Or had Danny started the web page by then? I can't remember. For some of us, server crashes and lost passwords in the early days have given us an 'adjusted date of hire'.
Similarly, the likely cause of the 1999 Egyptair 990 crash was revealed here long before the official reports were published. I was assured by others on PPRuNe in those pre-911 (and pre-Germanwings) days that it couldn't be suicide because the captain was a Muslim.
A poster named Uncle Jay posted his early speculative analysis of the 2009 Colgan Air 3407 mishap as a stall-spin accident and nearly nailed it in my opinion. For some reason his post was summarily removed by the mods.
So, why not just wait for the accident report to come out? Why look at the publically available information and data trails and form opinions and have these sometimes heated discussions?
For some of us in the flying business the lessons from a mishap may have practical application long before the final report is published. A suspected battery fire, fuel exhaustion mishap, or long landing runway excursion causes us to think twice about how we would avoid or handle those undesirable situations as we operate aircraft in just another day at the office.
And sometimes the final report just doesn't past the smell test based on what we have learned and discussed here and elsewhere. The Egyptair 990 report issued by Egypt's ECAA concluded that Gamal El-Batouti did not crash the plane despite fairly persuasive published evidence from the wreckage and investigation. Similarly, the Indonesian NTSC was unable to find the cause of the Silk Air 185 crash. In both of these cases the NTSB concluded that the probable cause was intentional control inputs by one of the pilots.
As Professor Feynman famously observed, often we know much more than we can prove. And as President Reagan's favorite Russian proverb dictates, trust but verify.