This is apparently a photo of the CVR which has just been retrieved.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7OXuE0CcAA2WYC.jpg

Source: CNA (6.57 PM Singapore time)

Good on the Indonesians for finding the boxes.They have achieved success with a lot of hard work.

They have been around for years on C-5 and C-141. See http://c141heaven.info/dotcom/traini...n_6_20_elt.pdf just the look of the document will tell you how old it is :)

It's clear that (at least within this forum) the consensus is that the way we handle aircraft flight data needs changing.

Ejectable data capsules are workable concept, Island_airphoto has a good point, you don't need to eject the the FDR/CVR, you need the data not the whole shooting match.
Solid state memory is fairly robust and light, ejectable data capsules could be modular so more than one could be carried for little gain in weight, heaviest component would be the battery for the location beacon.
Also rather than broadcasting till it dies, some sort of algorithm to broadcast high power for location purposes for 1 minute, then low power for a period, then shut down and repeat. This would extend battery life/reduce battery size required.

Multi-facted approach would be ideal, data streaming via satellite, squawk changing to either 7700 or a new code (7400?).

The trigger mechanism(s) and parameters need careful consideration, don't want it triggered unnecessarily but it could be staged, heavy turbulence could invoke data streaming, ROD over a prescribed limit below 15k (to allow for emergency descents due pressurisation issues), etc.

All of this talk of tracking and ejectable recorders seems to me to be waste of time and money.
Failure to recover the recorders is extremely rare, MH370 is a one-off event.
Finding the recorders in a few days rather than a few weeks is not going to affect safety or save lives.
The probability of finding survivors following a crash at sea is very low and in such cases we would expect to find EPIRB transmisssions anyway so what exactly would be gained by such changes ?

Exactly. A better ELT however (intended to save survivors) would be much more important than a device which allows to publish the report a few days earlier. In which major large aircraft accident of the last 50 years has the ELT been of any help to the survivors?
If the ELT points you to the crash site, finding the recorders will typically be a piece of cake.

I agree that failure to recover the recorders is rare, but difficulty finding them is common.
The cost of the search even the relatively short one with Air Asia is mindbendingly huge. Had the weather continued bad for another week, the ULBs would have died and increased the problems for the search.

So we have the typical case of its a rare event but when it happens it is extremely costly to the level of government spending limits costly in some cases. This cost eventually works its way through to the ticket price or taxes.

Against that we have the relatively cheap fixes for the problem which from an engineering viewpoint are trivial.

It is the classic beancounter bind. It costs their account money and yet the probability of something happening that provides ROI to _their account_ is very low. So they would be spending something to save someone else money. That won't fly with beancounters.

However, imagine if all the searches for black boxes - even the simple successful ones - had been just 2 days shorter. The savings to the aviation industry and governments running SAR OPS would be enormous. I think better design of crash and DFDR/CVR locator systems or different ways to recover the data will be an industry mandate possibly within 5 years.

Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore
 

I've followed this entire thread and there is one point that seems to have been missed about Inmarsat supposedly offering free tracking for airlines.

Narrow body aircraft such as the A320 and B737 do not have satellite coms as standard equipment. It is a customer option (read: expensive). Most airlines do not order it. Perhaps it is standard equipment on wide bodies but that would not have helped in this incident.

So to suggest that as a cheap option for narrow body airliners is ignoring a glaring fact.

Correct. Mandate it. Then there's no bickering amoungst the spreadsheeters. The days of people "doing the right thing" if it costs money are long gone. Regulation is the only way.

Considering all the advances being made in Battery Technology. Has there been any discussions on using a battery that could go, say, 60-90 days?

Or do the most current CVR, and FDR's already utilize the most advanced type?

But in this case the aircraft although over water was in good line-of-sight (LOS) of land with VHF and therefore VHF Data Link (VDL) . Most of ACARS is done over VDL whenever in LOS of ground stations. The tracking could be done on VDL.

Oceanic areas are starting to mandate FANS (ADS-C, CPDLC) via SATCOM I suspect that most oceanic areas will mandate FANS within a few years and that any aircraft flying out of LOS of land will be required to be fitted with FANS/SATCOM. There are a surprising number of single-aisle aircraft flying transatlantic.

Am I the only one that is having issues imagining how you can make a detachable, floating recorder be:

A) Strong enough to survive the same impacts as the current design
B) Light enough to float without a huge amount of flotation aid
C) Installable in the aircraft without significant and expensive redesign and recertification.

Surely, to make it crash resistant, it needs to be made to the same standard as the current design. And that means heavy.
The heavier it is, the more aid it needs to float.
The more aid it needs to float, the bigger the overall package will be.
Assuming of of course the technology exists to make a material than can float, yet withstand significant impact forces and damage.

If it's just a small recorder in a fibreglass or carbon fibre shell filled with foam, it's just not going to survive and will ultimately be useless.

SAR costs and triviality
 

Ian W ...

Good point about the search costs! I am doing calculations in that field. Quite complex, because quite a few assets and resources have multiple uses and applications.


A prudent design approach for commercial aircraft, in my view ( based on my experience ), is to start with saying that "nothing in the design of commercial aircraft is trivial". Even very small and apparently insignificant changes can be very or even extremely costly. There are thousands of examples for that. You do not add anything until you can really make a case, and make that case to 'all specialist directions' and 'stakeholders'.

Look. Both Recorders have been found

The plane itself would have to be found sooner or later for a couple of reasons, both for humanity and for investigation.

The only real super mystery , no black box, no plane situation is MH370 and we may find that in time.

AND EVERYONE WANTS TO CHANGE EVERYTHING> I think mainly because people can't watch TV news anymore.

I'd rather spend the money on overlapping doppler wx radar from the ground on ATC radar and sending ground wx radar to planes for pilot evaluation.

That's the best suggestion in 98 pages

@nieuport28 "Considering all the advances being made in Battery Technology. Has there been any discussions on using a battery that could go, say, 60-90 days?"

There already seems to be a reasonable level of adoption of 90 day batteries in ULBs - see:

RJE International - Aviation - Underwater Locator Beacons

Also it seems that there are new regulations (tso-c121b and ED112A ULB) that seem to imply that 90 day battery life for ULBs will be the norm after March 2015 with older 30 day batteries going out of use after that date. I don't know if the rules will require all batteries to be replaced by 90 day ones or if only new installations will require them, but it does seem that the use of 30 day batteries will become a thing of the past.

There seems to be a long European regulatory amendment document at http://www.easa.europa.eu/system/fil...PA-2013-26.pdf which seems to imply on page 10 that "Mandate that the ULDs of all crash-protected flight recorders have a transmission time of 90 days by 1 January 2020"

AO283 a quick question:

How do you separate out the true costs for a search?

Take almost ANY crash as an example. The day before the crash all the men and women in the crash investigation were employed by their various countries and companies.

However on the day of the crash they are quickly seconded to a new job for a few days, weeks or months. But they are still getting paid, for the most part, by their countries and companies.

On a more narrow focus take, for an example, the guy sitting in the engine room of a Coast Guard ship. He gets paid the same if the ship in training or searching for sunken ferries or airplanes. Right? The only true costs of the engine room guy doing a search is if he has to work longer shifts and gets some overtime.

When media talks about the tremendous costs for searches I am hesitant to believe. Perhaps if they were to include ONLY the the cost of over-time or fuel for extra hours of operation then it would be more realistic.

Do you mean that for example the tens of millions of dollars that the Australian Defence Force has spent looking for MH370 would have been spent otherwise and anyways in training rather than real world SAR?

For some applications I use NIJ Class III armor (7.62 FMJ NATO) that floats (density <1).

Once again, in response to a tragic hull loss with appalling loss of life, so-called "professional pilots" are proposing the industry spends vast amounts of money on more gadgets and widgets to ensure more rapid or guaranteed location and recovery of the DFDR and CVR.

As reluctant SLF and related to others, I would prefer the money to be spent on better training, so that me/my relatives/friends don't end up in the water in the first instance.

Anyone who has spent any time in aviation will realise the hardware option will take loadsa time and money before anything is agreed, designed, developed, flight tested, certified and finally installed in ALL 'frames.

If this accident turns out to be flight deck HF related, as per AF447, then I think that PREVENTION is better than WRECKAGE LOCATION.

If this 'bus has bunted over and dived for the earth as per the recent AD, with the possibly unaware pilot(s) applying full aft stick, then surely the solution lies elsewhere and not in the fitting of investigative aids? :ugh:

The older generation couldn't either mate, as was demonstrated time and again.

What are you flying? DC-3's?
The aircraft involved was an A320.

.

I know very well what you are talking about. You are talking about outdated equipment and your skill in the black art of using it. Bully for you.
It's all wrong, if you use it wrongly. But the modern gear is easier to use. So less often dangerously wrong.

I'll lay a penny to a pound that (if this was indeed a cb encounter) it came down to pilot decision making, not equipment shortcomings. And by the way - by pilot decision making I refer to the kind of hard choices forced on pilots every day, when ATC refuse course deviations.

ATC refuse deviations que! ATC or CB ? Mayday I'm deviating. Having said that I have never been refused point blank.

Shock and fire resistance no longer mean heavy since the advent of Kevlar, Carbon, honeycombes and foams. Current commercial combined recorders are only a couple of Kg.

Deployable Combined Data Recorders have been used successfully and usefully by the US Navy since 1993.

The NTSB(US) recommended in 1999 that two Combined data Recorders should be used, on separate power grids, both with RIPS. One should be deployable, both should be spatially separated (eg tail and nose). The FAA(US) is still thinking about it having been given 3.5 million to do so.

The SAFE act mandating the NTSB proposal has been introduced 4 times to Congress, most recently in March 2014.

Basically Airbus has said it will implement this proposal on their wet long range new builds A350 and A380. The proposed recorder performance massively exceeds current legal requirements, I do not see a big problem with certification and if Airbus did they would probably not have released the info. If EASA green lights it, I do not see how the FAA can object especially as they have a 15 year old NTSB recommendation for it.

As to uploaded ground based weather radar data, this is as I understand it already available using ADS-B. NextGen and Single European Sky would probably mandate it.

BUT! a lot of this applies to North America/Europe. Other airspaces may have to comply in order to fly to and over the US/Europe but for example in the case of MH370, just because they physically can do ACARS over satellite, does not mean they feel like paying to do so. Even the Marshall Islands have their own, technically independent, CAA.

I said exactly the same, right up to that highlighted line. I can't agree with that.
Maybe this is a misunderstanding. What do you mean by 'stronger'? More amplitude?
What is being debated is frequency band. That's where the systems have changed notably.
If you have a land or ship borne system you may be able to produce enormous beam amplitude, but on an aircraft you don't have that luxury. Varying the frequency band varies beam penetration for a given power output/amplitude.

but this is what boofhead detests. Raw data is best! For him.....

I mentioned the ITCZ in West Africa. In relation to a severe incident/near accident caused by ancient WX radar. It was NASA who charecterised the CB as a super-cell in the incident report (based on WX sat data).
Having seen the aircraft after the event, and spoken with my colleagues, it was no ordinary CB. NASA commented that the flight probably only penetrated the outer edges before they turned/got spat out. They also speculated that further penetration would almost certainly have resulted in a breakup.

I have no opinion on the severity of the storm involved in the AK crash. We don't know.

Then I assume you never fly in China airspace.

In extremis, yes of course, a PAN or even MAYDAY may be your last resort. But most pilots are reluctant to do that, rather than attempt to negotiate a compromise with ATC.
Because 'going nuclear' might cost you your job and/or your freedom in some parts of the world. Hard choices for sure. That's why we get paid such BIG BUCKS. :rolleyes:

and......
Even though this guy is clearly BARKING MAD, I completely agree with him!

:p

Heck, they found AF 447 and there is some question about the entire "truth" of that event due to only parts of the CVR being released (per standard practices).

@ glendalegoon: Amen Deacon! (in re wx radar information flow)

BARKINGMAD: Likewise inclined. Suggest training and cockpit culture is the area most helpful in such prevention efforts.

In order to help find out that where the problem was, and propose solutions, and possibly adopt them (if not too expensive), and suggest that non EU/US CAAs adopt them too ... and prevent the problem ...

you need to find the wreckage and the data recorders.

Which is why the NTSB recommended deployable data recorders in 1999!

Barkingmad:
If it helps to reassure a bit, the airline I work for has been focused on stall recognition/recovery for the last six months of recurrent training/checking in the simulator. All our pilots have now been exposed to this and we are acutely aware of the problems that AF447 encountered. I'm sure my Company is not alone in this, I'm sure many others will have taken the same approach, even before this accident (if stalling/unreliable airspeed is involved, of course). The industry is generally good at learning from incidents/accidents.

Algol, Yep still wouldn't fly through a T/S. & have had no problems (deviating) on the odd occasion (very Few) that I have been in Chinese airspace.
It is worrying then that ATC are now putting aircraft at risk. I wonder if this fact will be a factor in this instance. If only the SLF realised what aviation has come too.:hmm:

Until we get the data we do not know the chain of events which led up to this accident.

It's possible this accident may not be weather related or weather may be a small factor along with other factors which currently we are not aware of.

Anyone who wants to see radar freq. vs. rain can take a look here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvTkVj5-uv0
This isn't POWER, it is FREQUENCY.

Ice pack : Again , you do not seem to understand that ATC is not there to put aircraft at risk regarding weather. ATC has another function , proactive weather avoidance is not their task. Also you have to realise that most ATC centres do not have weather radars superimposed on their radar displays.

In this case, ATC allowed the crew to deviate horizontally, as requested. The climb was delayed , but for the correct reasons. If the crew percieved a risk, they could easily have overuled ATC and climb, (and maybe they did) .

From what I have heard so far, I am not sure weather alone is the reason of this crash . But a bit of patience, with both recorders recovered now we probably will know soon enough .

It is also things like FTC and STC to reduce clutter and I am sure lots of digital processing now.

"Sensitivity Time Control (STC). This feature reduces the impact of returns from sea state. It reduces the minimum SNR of the receiver for a short duration immediately after each pulse is transmitted. The effect of adjusting the STC is to reduce the clutter on the display in the region directly around the transmitter. The greater the value of STC, the greater the range from the transmitter in which clutter will be removed. However, an excessive STC will blank out potential returns close to the transmitter.

Fast Time Constant (FTC). This feature is designed to reduce the effect of long duration returns that come from rain. This processing requires that strength of the return signal must change quickly over it duration. Since rain occurs over and extended area, it will produce a long, steady return. The FTC processing will
filter these returns out of the display. Only pulses that rise and fall quickly will be displayed. In technical terms, FTC is a differentiator, meaning it determines the rate of change in the signal, which it then uses to discriminate pulses which are not changing rapidly."

Radar Systems


island_airphoto
Anyone who wants to see radar freq. vs. rain can take a look here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvTkVj5-uv0
This isn't POWER, it is FREQUENCY.

The military currently have developed an integrated battlefield radar picture that takes all radar sources painting any target and integrates them into a composite 'objective' picture. Any fighter can then switch their radar off if necessary for stealth purposes and still get an accurate presentation via data link of the targets computed 'as if' from their individual perspective.

Similarly with TCAS we share our info on relative positions.

The recent extreme storms in Brisbane Australia demonstrated that extreme cell pictures vary, dependent on the relative direction of the radars. The weather radar North of BNE showed a quite different picture to the one South of BNE especially regarding the all important gaps between major cells.

It would seem not to difficult to integrate ground and air weather radars into a composite picture, particularity relating to dangerous cells. This is even simpler than the battlefield situation because we fly on narrow air routes in ideal, reciprocal directions.

Just a thought about the ejectable CVR/FDR issue. How about having a duplicate copy of the memory modules stuck into the vertical stabilizer. It seems that this is the first thing to be shed from the plane, and also seems to float -- not to mention that it is big enough to identify in a search.

Think of the AA A300 crash out of JFK, the AF 447 crash in the Atlantic, and now this Air Asia crash. The first thing found was the floating VS section.

On seach costs .. answer to John in YVR
 

John, all the points that you mention are valid. They show part of why it is complex.

In my view there is no such thing as 'true' costs. In all cost calculation (and its foundation on costs collection and allocation) there is a lot of subjectivity.

Subjectivity returns at the beginning of the 'top' search costs calculation. P.M. Tony Abbott used a 'common' (common in both government and industry) statement early on in MH 370 when he said something like "we have these (navy) ships anyway, so there is no (extra) cost". That is a different viewpoint from what I would take, that is starting with the statement that all activities and all asset uses carry costs.

When the search took longer, the costs came 'out in the open', because part of the search was outsourced (costs published). And part of the naval assets had to return to the missions/activities they were on when it all started. If not, then they would have to add a line item in the navy budget for new assets and for certain deepwater search systems.

One of the easy parts of this is, that many or most of the costs are known or familiar. In aerospace design that can be different, there you sometimes have to calculate with 'technical costs' because the systems or components have never been manufactured before.

... this idea that every single step anyone takes or nut & bolt wasting away in a store always needs costing and charging (to someone or some budget or other) irks me..

really, not exactly proactive forward thinkkng govt. And what better exercises
and real life experience & training is there than being out there and doing stuff..
rather than twiddling fingers in offices, docks barracks.

if Tony Abbott is happy then let them get on with it... if the British Govt.
hadn't sanctioned the (novel) recovery of the Comet Papa India and
given Sir Arnold Hall & Farnborough a blank cheque in the early fifties and then
paid for a fully Public Enquiry... it could have been many years for
the full facts of metal fatigue's random scatter to be fully accounted for
in design. Plus all the other spinoffs... tank testing etc.
Doubt anyone was wasting time cost counting back then when all those facilities
and staff existed
bean counters eh? How much do they cost to house & feed :)

ATC watcher
I was replying to Algol.
What part of :
Quote:
In extremis, yes of course, a PAN or even MAYDAY may be your last resort. But most pilots are reluctant to do that, rather than attempt to negotiate a compromise with ATC.
Because 'going nuclear' might cost you your job and/or your freedom in some parts of the world. Hard choices for sure. That's why we get paid such BIG BUCKS.
Un Quote
Didn't I understand.

Furthermore, major Cb cells containing lightning are easily tracked from above by satellites and could be fed into an integrated dangerous weather picture.

(Another major advantage in the military use of data integration is that strike aircraft can track multiple targets behind them and release multiple missiles that quickly loop overhead after release to take care of following bogies. The aircraft in front have a missile range advantage then because their missiles are travelling with the relative 'wind' giving a missile major drag advantage.)

For a long time we have relied on doppler radar to sort static rocks from moving clouds on descent into terminal areas. The airfield radar has an advantage in that it's looking up away from the terrain. Even this level of integration in the terminal areas would be a great help, especially in low wind velocity conditions.