Technology Status?
 

I can buy an INS for $150 that has integrated GPS and three axis-accelerometer, gyro and magnetometer, along with barometer.

It knows its absolute position within centimetres and its attitude to better than a degree in each axis.

This unit is derived from full scale INS so I ask the question why there is a problem on modern aircraft when pitot tubes and whatever are blocked / misreading?

I understand there is a difference between actual air speed components and true ground-speed, but why is this high precision information source not used? Or if it is, why are things like pitot tubes more important and overriding the absolute measurements? Especially over extended period of seconds to minutes?

So do we actually know what its final altitude was? Reports it was around FL360 but they didn't even have permission to climb to FL340 - as that was giving when they didn't respond.......

@Mahatma Kote

I am not a pilot, but I can give a guess. Your device cannot measure airspeed, and airspeed is critical as to whether the aircraft stalls. I don't think there is a compact technology (doesn't kill aerodynamics) that can measure airspeed without sticking something small out into the wind (which makes it prone to icing up).

Correct one?
 

Yep. And reinsurers must be thinking that insuring planes is becoming risky. Allianz were the lead reinsurer for MH370 as well as this plane (and also MH17). If this one is not found, they may start to insist on real time tracking. If airlines chose not to implement this, then insurers may chose not to offer cover.

If tracking is possible, then insurers will may not continue to simply accept claims for planes that disappear without trace.

Seriously ? :ugh:

Insurers work on statistics my friend.

As I've already highlighted on this thread .... how many flights occur every year ? How many flights have occurred over the last 10 years ? 20 years ?

How many of these millions of flights have been affected by a problem that would be solved by some expensive solution ??

A quick Google suggests the three major passenger airline alliances did a combined total estimated 50,000 flights per day in 2014, that's 18,250,000 fights in 2014 !

So the POTENTIALLY "untraceable" loss of 2 or 3 aircraft, whilst obviously sad, is a mere needle in a haystack at 0.00001643835616438356%. And that's just the number for the "alliances", if you consider the other non-alliance airlines, that percentage becomes even smaller !

Obviously 2014 was a "bad" year,some years you may have no "untraceable" losses at all.

That's why you need to evaluate the risk vs reward in business, and quite frankly the risk just is not sufficient to start running around like headless chickens spending money deploying technology across entire fleets !

I also suggest you go read post #340 from PT6Driver which further reinforces the pointlessness of such tracking solutions.

The only thing the reinsurers would do is laugh your idea out of the room ! The insurers are in the business of dealing with risks !

Aviation remains one of the safest and least risky modes of transport on earth, and the insurers/reinsurers know that !

Quite a bit of info and related links on the wikipedia page for this flight

Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Time will tell I guess.

You can bet that Allianz are not laughing right now.

Communication technology continues to evolve rapidly. What seems expensive or not practical or not justified on a cost:benefit analysis today may (probably will) soon become routine.

Even today there are handheld units that cost a few hundred $ (e.g. Spider tracks) that determine GPS location every minute and transmit it via Iridium at a few cents a message.

With 100% Hindsight, should they have routed via Jakata?


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...te_Imagery.jpg

Without any basis of fact I, like everyone else, is "assuming" that this is a weather related incident. Specifically, a possible inadvertent cell penetration.

So here's my pet peeve regarding the serviceability of weather radar.

Most MEL's allows for the weather radar to be unserviceable for 10 days (Category C) albeit with certain exceptions. These exceptions are open to interpretation.

And as we know, whenever there are commercial pressures, interpretation of any exceptions pertaining to safety never ends well for the crews.

The MEL for Radar needs to be changed to Category A. And the exceptions tightened up to minimize a "relaxed" interpretation for commercial reasons.

The thing that really angers me is that in contrast, the CVR, which does absolutely nothing for the immediate safety of the aircraft in which it's installed is allowed to be unserviceable for only 3 days.

EK 409 was a few miles ahead, a bit further left of track, but that was a 777.

This is not disputed.
All it will take is a Class Action by relatives of victims under US jurisdiction for distress. It is a matter of time, and the industry must and will change its practices. The industry is living in the comfort zone of the (Montreal) past.

Why do you think Allianz is referred to as "lead insurer" ?

That's because aviation insurance involves spreading the risk across a consortium of different insurance companies, that's what Lloyd's does, it provides a market for the insurers to do deals between themselves and package out risk obligations.

Whilst Allianz refuse to comment, when the numbers do emerge you'll probably find their own direct exposure to the two MH instances and this event is only a fraction of the total sums insured !

Lloyd's has been around for 300 years. So whilst insurers are in the business of taking on risk, they're not stupid, they know how to minimise their own risk too !

Again, I am not a pilot, I am an EE by training.

@Mahatma KoteNormal radar doppler only reflects off airborne particles like dust, water and ice. It passes right through air, so it cannot directly measure airspeed. If it gets reflected by air, then it would not be able to measure anything at all, as it will get absorbed the instant it leaves the instrument before reaching the air you want to measure. The same reason why those probes protrude out of the fuselage of the aircraft.

I did a google search and found Calibrating airborne measurements of airspeed, pressure and temperature using a Doppler laser air-motion sensor | OpenSky - Providing free and open access to the scholarship of UCAR, NCAR, and the UCP which uses laser to measure airspeed, but considering that the paper was only written this year, it is not likely to reach the aircraft for at least a couple of decades, even if it gets there.

@training wheels
 

don't understand what makes diff if B777 or A320?


speaking of my experience in similar situation years back from sin to jkt, you need to act quickly when you hit CB and have very little margin of speed change, not climb but descent (speed tape with vls and max almost touching each other is not a comfortable area to fly in such wx)

Obie
You are obviously not a pilot or one of the new computer breed that crashed the air France. Fmgc limits are not for flying through storms they are advisory for good conditions. Remember the airbus is an aeroplane and should be flown as such. WE CAN NEVER BEAT THE LAW OF PHYSICS.

Huh? I don't care, don't know, and don't even want to know what the MEL says about radar: After 20K+ long haul hours, I still DO NOT depart with inoperative radar. :ooh:

Well said GlueBall
Airmanship over manuals, a dirty phrase in the modern world but it works.

I hope ppl like news reporters will stop comparing flying hrs of a pilot...


eg pilot working and limited to European airspace will never encounter same wx like someone who flies in asia or africa where you have limited resources of info and support

MEL's also have stipulations about convective weather not being present as well..

Details on Copilot's background
 

French Press confirms he got his ATPL at the age of 42.
Le copilote français de l'avion disparu débutait sa carrière

Should not the possibility of the plane crashing in the Belitung forests be considered?

It does not matter in this case how many flights a given plane makes. What matters to insurance is that X airframes out of Y insured are gone. The number of actual planes is a percentage of flights a day, as most are in the air daily and several times. According to Boeing ther were 20000 commercial aircraft in the world in 2012. 3 of those are 0.015%. Perhaps that seems small, but it sure has a lot fewer zeroes past the decimal point.

My MEL says I can't depart with WX RDR u/s if there is any wx that could be detected by radar enroute.

I have no problems flying without radar when the weather is good. I am in the business of transporting passengers from A to B, not finding ways to cancel the flight.

Device doesnt measure airspeed..
 

@cee cee...

There are aircraft that do not have pitot tubes...

I carry a nice little unit that displays g, attitude and flight path using a nice kalman filter, it is far better than the 100k i recently spent on an IFSD upgrade. Why do you need airspeed? With extraordinarily accurate att and fpv, i can generate airspeed if it makes you feel better, but tthe sircraft doesnt care, it only knows alpha and g loading. And until we as heavy jet pilots remember that we are going to repeat upsets.

Now for the subject topic of AAsias tragedy, how about letting the experts get on without the static that this forum generates with such ease. Sontoso et al are able to fibd and annalyse such an event with reasonable confidence, let them do their job, and let the families and airline grieve in respectful peace.

INS cannot give you airspeed and GPS does not help
 

GPS works really well in combination with an inertial navigation system to give your current position, speed etc. All of this ends up being rerenced to an earth based coordinate system via the GPS. This is very useful but not if you want the velocity of the aircraft relative to the air surrounding it. In this case you either need an independant measure of the air velocity relative to the ground and this in general seems totally impractical or you need to measure the speed with respect to the aircraft which brings you back to where you started. An INS is no use at all for measuring airspeed. It is perfect for measuring ground speed.

On why they do not use doppler to measure airspeed I am not an engineer working in this area but it may well be because you need to bounce a signal of a known frequency and velocity off something moving wth the air. I imagine there is not always anything there to bounce off. There are lots of ways of measuring gas velocity but I am sure the possible methods, their reliability, operating ranges, failure modes etc have been analysed extensively over the last 7 decades or so and what is used is used for good reasons.

It isn't a cost issue, as I already outlined. It is a political issue. Real time monitoring would require a new aviation band allocation. The international bun fight over allocation of available radio bands favours telecommunications companies seeking profits: Non-proifit, non-military use is pushed aside in the scramble.

As slats11 puts it:
That says it all. Entertainment and other frivoluous use of the limited radio spectrum takes priority over aviation and we have lost so many frequency bands already: there just isn't an available channel for data telemetry - or any other additional aviation communications use.

Hell, we are beginning to have our airspace invaded by uncontrolled UAVs. [Yes they are just big-boys' toys, but still capable of bringing down an aircraft.]

Mahatma Kote,

With well trained and experienced pilots in the cockpit, there isn't a problem when pitot tubes are blocked. They know what to do, they understand attitude and thrust.

High precision ground speed from the 3 IRS's on board is one of the many tools a well trained and experienced pilot can use to determine which airspeed readings are erroneous and which are accurate. But not before securing the aircraft in a safe attitude and thrust setting for the conditions.

Problems arise when airline CEO's start believing that aircraft fly themselves (and indeed fix themselves), and do not believe having well-trained and experienced flight crew is necessary. This is what we call the "race to the bottom", and it doesn't only happen in Asia.

AF447 crashed because the pilots crashed it. I'm not speculating on this incident but merely answering your questions.

If a dispatcher presented me with a flight plan that had a course depicted like this one right through the centre of severe to extreme weather, I and no one I work with would dream of accepting it - so how was their flight plan created? Do they have a qualified flight dispatch department? If this is accurately portrayed why would the planners have thought it acceptable to file a course through an area of very heavy weather? Why should a pilot have to get airborne on a route that was clearly not going to work, and then have to start "negotiating"?

If each DFDR produced 100 parameters at 16 bit resolution at once per sec, that would be 200 bytes per sec per a/c. For 2,500 a/c, that would be 500 kilobytes/sec.

NASA's TDRS satellites are designed for receiving and forwarding telemetry, and have a total bandwidth of about about 1.1 gigabit/sec (137 megabytes/sec). Of this bandwidth handling all parameters from all DFDRs from all in-flight commercial a/c would take about 4% of TDRS capacity.

Obviously the primary use TDRS is for NASA but they accept other special users. I'm not saying continuous telemetry from all large commercial a/c is needed, nor that TDRS is the best way, but it illustrates the raw capacity is already there.

They must have flown very often to 'straya and got hollered at so badly by the very anal ybbb atc that they became psychologically damaged...hence the suicidal propensity to follow the magenta line into cb cells until they get the clearance to deviate!

Ybbb atc strikes great fear into Asian airline companies so much so pilots get severely punished for deviating without clearance!

Totem

In other words, it's 100% responsibility and no authority. Another gaping safety issue.

Now why does that not surprise me?!

Ybbb atc strikes great fear into Asian airline companies so much so pilots get severely punished for deviating without clearance!

that's when you make a PAN call and deviate as necessary...no clearance needed then...better than the other options yes?

No, it really doesn't. :ugh:

Do you buy an A380 and the leave it on the tarmac and just shout to the world that you've got capacity 400 people ?

No.

Well its the same with satellites.

Satellites cost a lot of money to build, get into space and monitor.

A satellite is in use 24 hours a day, 365 days a year as soon as the satellite reaches space, the operators will already be activating contracts ..... the cost of using satellite transmissions reflects the limited spare capacity available.

A satellite may well have a total transmission capability of X, but you can bet your bottom dollar that most of that capacity has been sold, if not even largely oversold on a contended basis ! The satellite operators would be out of business if that was not the case.

Satellite has always been and will always be more expensive than any form of ground communication, because of all the constraints the technology has, including the technology itself.... once its up there, you can't exactly turn up on site one day and upgrade the kit to newer stuff !

So please guys... ENOUGH of these stupid requests for realtime streaming data from all aircraft .... it just isn't workable. Period.

FYI

Civil Aeronautics Board
Aircraft Accident Report

Northwest Airlines, Inc.
Boeing 720B, N724US
Near Miami, Florida
February 12, 1963

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Flight_705.pdf

Synopsis

Northwest Airlines, Inc., Boeing 720B, N724US, operating as Flight 705, crashed in an unpopulated area of the Everglades National Park, 37 miles west-southwest of Miami International Airport at approximately 1350 e s.t , on February 12, 1963. All 35 passengers and the crew of eight were fatally injured

Flight 705 departed Miami at 1335 e.s.t. Circuitous routing was utilized during the climbout in an effort to avoid areas of anticipated turbulence associated with thunderstorm activity. At 1347 e.s.t , in response to a request for their position and altitude, the flight advised, "We're just out of seventeen five (17,500 feet) and stand by on the DME one." This was the last known transmission from the flight. Shortly thereafter the aircraft entered a steep dive, during which the design limits were exceeded and the aircraft disintegrated in flight.

The Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the unfavorable interaction of severe vertical air drafts and large longitudinal control displacements resulting in a longitudinal upset from which a successful recovery was not made.

Getting Lost...
 

My previous post: http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/5...ml#post8801005

Was talking about NASA TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellites): Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They are already built and flying and mainly just used for telemetry from space launches. They have over 1 gigabit/sec of capacity, so they are vastly over-provisioned for the initial intended use. Consequently NASA sells bandwidth on these to other agencies, including non-governmental entities.

I'm not saying continuous telemetry from commercial DFDRs is needed, nor that TDRS is the best way even if it was needed. I'm just responding to the post that there's no available satellite bandwidth.

Relevance
 

If it was Commercial Pilots only contributing here, the thread would stay far more relevant (more or less!).

However it is open to all, so we will get subjected to lots of off-track contributions.(Insurance, telemetry, piracy to cite but 3!). To be fair, 99% of air accidents involve pilots directly, but there are the occasional ones such as the Ukraine shoot-down where the pilots will not have had a clue and were doing their job correctly. (Note I say "involve", not ascribing blame unilaterally)

Speculation can be good; however, as the national reports can take a long time to be issued and in some cases are worthless. And manufacturers need to react quickly if a technical issue crops up, in order to prevent further accidents long before waiting for the national report to be issued.

And officialdom can anyway be hopelessly wrong, or biased. Their "facts" can be as correct as a politician's. The Egyptair 767 mid-Atlantic suicide crash is widely seen as a case in point.

Debris
 

Slats 11:
January 1, 2007 Adam Air Flight KI-574, flying from Surabaya, on Java Island, to Manado, on Sulawesi Island, disappeared in bad weather with 102 people aboard. It took 10 days for any trace of wreckage to be found.

Perhaps the crew from that EK409 or AWQ504 flights can comment on the conditions experienced rather than the interpretation (or be it misinterpretation) of the data available....