In the light of another bad crash how come they still use them? Why isn’t the info saved onto the (aptly named) cloud?
Black box recorders
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Is the internet that reliable up there?
Put a satellite up?
Airbus use a satellite system alongside black boxes (which I recently discovered are actually orange). It’s not been adopted more universally for a combination of reasons most of which come down to money. Most days there are over 100k commercial flights across the world so there’s a massive amount of data and a huge stock of planes that would need new tech installed. Secure, reliable storage via satellites spook the airliner companies too – not a long queue of people wanting Musk’s Starlink to hold their flight records.
Ok thx yes I guess set up on existing planes would be massive
Flight recorders are orange in colour for the obvious reason that they are are meant to be easier to spot amongst wreckage. It’s all relative of course. Who knows what heat, flame and impact may have wrought in each case.
Perhaps less obviously, they’re orange to make them easier to spot underwater. All depends on the depth they settle at, but if not massively deep, orange is a colour that stands out underwater. Dive watches will often have an element of it on their dials.
40 m down it’s all blue, even orange is blue, I’m a diver.
Having once worked in civil radar equipment, technical progress in aviation is glacially slow. As you would hope, as if something goes wrong, planes literally fall out of the sky. So anything new has to be tested for years.
Black box recorders have been around for decades and will be around for decades more. Mobile internet has only been here for the blink of an eye.
As an aside, during lockdown, many car factories were furloughed because of a shortage of silicon chips. It wasn’t really a shortage of *any* silicon chips, but a shortage of the *one* particular silicon chip which had passed the safety testing. Safety testing takes years and costs millions, so they don’t bother getting more than one done. During lockdowns, I was mad busy redesigning circuit boards to use whatever chips were available, as my employer’s end product isn’t safety tested for carrying passengers (but still have to be reliable 24/7).
I work with stuff that can be used for cars. We are in OTP (one time programmable), memory. Mostly we would program 4 times the number of bits necessary for automotives so that if one bit is weakly programmed and can’t be read then we have alternatives, this will probably put us in the range of less than 1 ppm failure rate over a product lifetime. I would imagine for aircraft the equivalent would be 64 bits or more, getting into failure rates of 1 in 100s of millions over the lifetime of the aircraft. I hope that’s what Boeing do anyway
Belt and braces!
You really don’t want to put the key in the ignition and get a “failed to read bad sector” message, do you?