Airbus to use black boxes that exit the plane during a crash, floating away and remaing accessible rather than sinking to unknown depths.
IT'S BEEN MORE than three years since Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 vanished, and after spending $150 million and scouring a huge chunk of the Indian Ocean, the international search effort... will never really know why it went down, or how to prevent it happening again.
Airbus says it has a solution: deployable flight data recorders. On large planes that frequently fly over water or remote areas, the European aircraft manufacturer will install a second, redundant black box near the rear of the fuselage, with a mechanical ejection system.
If the plane crashes into the ocean, the recorder will pop out to safety, floating and pinging away with an emergency locator transmitter, to help rescue teams find it and its valuable testimony about what went wrong. The ejection function is just one feature of Airbus' new black boxes (which are actually fluorescent orange), which are smaller and more capable than the current generation, able to record 25 hours of cockpit voice and data, up from the current two hours.
The recorder will only eject in the event of “major structural deformation” or submersion in six feet of water, which should reassure airlines that it won’t accidentally deploy in heavy turbulence or on hard landings. And the spring loaded mechanical system will be more palatable than earlier proposals for an explosive ejection system.
“The more digitized the airplane becomes, the more valuable that information is,” says air safety specialist, Christine Negroni, author of The Crash Detectives, Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters...
https://www.wired.com/story/airbus-n...asier-to-find/
This is not a new concept:
Boeing, Airbus at odds over black boxes that eject
October 7, 2014 by Joan Lowy
https://phys.org/news/2014-10-boeing...ble-black.html
The world's two largest commercial aircraft manufacturers are at odds over equipping airliners with black boxes that eject in the event of a crash, making them easier to find.
Airbus is nearly ready to equip airliners with data and cockpit voice recorders that eject so that they can float to the ocean's surface instead of becoming trapped in wreckage, Pascal Andrei, the French aircraft maker's chief product security officer, told a forum of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday.
Boeing, Airbus' chief rival, has no plans to include such recorders in its planes, Mark Smith, an accident investigator for the aircraft maker, told the safety board. Such recorders are prone to ejecting accidentally and creating a safety risk, he warned.
...Based on previous searches for planes, Smith estimated there will be only one accident every 10 years involving a commercial airliner that crashes into the ocean and cannot be found for more than a year. On the other hand, five or six accidental ejections are likely each year, he said.
"Unintended (ejections) from a commercial airplane would not be an acceptable risk and would be a risk that we would have to manage," Smith said. "We need to beware of the introducing unintended consequences into the large commercial fleet that is flying."
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https://phys.org/news/2014-10-boeing...black.html#jCp