How many self-serving bureaucrats, corporate executives, politicians, and union leaders, from how many different countries, would likely get in the way of actual improvements?
How tiny a percent of airline flight outcomes would be substantially improved by any sounds-good change to the Black Boxes?
Sticking with the status quo sounds pretty optimal to me.
(After several cool-sounding stories of crashes, the article comes to a similar conclusion.)
There's no impediment to any aircraft manufacturer or any airline to develop their own superior system, and augment what's required. Surely, the case could be made that it's helpful mitigating even just future revenue catastrophes?
Pilot unions actively lobby against cameras in the cockpit. Some airlines would be in violation of their contracts if they bought more cockpit monitoring systems.
It isn’t an entirely unfair gripe. The AF 447 debacle was down to “pilot error” officially. The cause of the crash was that one pilot was commanding the aircraft incorrectly and the other pilots weren’t aware because the dual controls in an Airbus dont mirror each other like in all other aircraft. The real question for me is how do you design critical control systems so poorly that one person can be flying the plane in a configuration they aren’t aware of (the stick on an Airbus will react differently to the same input differently based on conditions) , and the other two people in the cockpit aren’t able to even see this. This is a design issue.
They would have had to have seen it over by the pilots knee, known that that stick was active, and known that the aircraft had switched automatically to ALT2 in the middle of trying to figure out the equipment problem that caused the initial instrument problem.
Normally a full back stick command wouldn’t have stalled the aircraft, but because the airplane entered ALT2 mode automatically the stick allowed the pilot to do something that normally wouldn’t happen. If the pilot had done exactly what he did 5 minutes earlier, the exact same command would have not led to a crash.
In other words, the main control device for the aircraft can do something different depending on circumstance.
This would be like a car steering wheel becoming twice as sensitive when the speedometer malfunctions.
The idea is that, yes, the pilots were trained on this, so it’s their fault no matter how complex the system is.
The vast majority of incidents are brought to conclusion on why it happened. Even the one article uses as an example. I was watching a bunch of post-mortems of various accidents and just about the only thing that came up when it comes to problems with black boxes is:
* That some of them recorded voice cabin sound for too short (which was fixed in later ones but there are still some old planes flying
* That the cockpit voice recorder recorded in a loop and someone forgot to pull the fuse after accident and it got overwritten.
And overall even those would add very little to investigation.
It has simply become good enough and still are incrementally improved.
Even if you're dodging ~all the regulations which specify the current Black Boxes by adding a separate, independent system (and you'll still face a lot of regulations)...there still are three obvious impediments - (1) development costs, (2) unit costs, and (3) legal liability. Vs. the incredibly-long-odds theory that something might happen, eventually, where your new & better system would be a substantial benefit.
(BTW, my experience is that "the case could be made for X" is a polite way of saying "a valid technical argument could be made in favor of X...but in the bigger picture X is clearly the wrong theory / engineering choice / business decision".)
And, given the rarity of aircraft crashes, the benefit to some small subset of the industry adopting an incrementally better system is probably pretty much nil.
> When they DON'T move at glacial pace you get the 737 MAX.
I’d argue the existence of the 737 MAX was a response to the FAA moving at a glacial pace, if you want to look at root causes.
The 737 MAX exists because Boeing was getting their butts handed to them in the market by the Airbus A320 Neo due to its superior fuel efficiency.
Boeing engineers wanted to create a new clean sheet single aisle aircraft to replace the 50 year old 737 (+737 NG) design. However, Boeing management decided that it would take too long to design + get it past the FAA , so they pivoted to another 737 upgrade. Another factor in this decision was that upgrading the 737 would allow the airlines to transfer their pilots over with minimal training.
However, to keep the same "type" as a 737, Boeing had to keep the planes dynamics exactly the same as the previous model.
Simultaneously, Boeing went on a full on lobbying blitz to get the FAA to allow them to “self certify” aspects of the design. Boeing had a legitimate argument here, the ESEA had streamlined the type variant process years ago allowing Airbus to quickly iterate on their existing designs.
So congress/FAA finally relents and allows Boeing to bring stuff in house. However, in retrospect, this was done without the collaboration and checks that the ESEA and Airbus have implemented, ensuring that the process generates the correct results.
If the FAA I’ve been quicker to read the tea leaves and implement a collaborative model, I’d like to think that flies in the 737 MAX would’ve been caught.
A big part of why Airbus can get away with it because of their control model. It's total fly by wire, so a given input will result in the exact same roll/pitch rate, vs on a Boeing where the inputs map to control deflections. So Airbus gets "flies the same" for free.
Don’t give Boeing any leeway to excuse this, it wasn’t then innovating and the FAA moving fast:
> “Boeing has agreed to pay $2.5bn (£1.8bn) to settle US criminal charges that it hid information from safety officials about the design of its 737 Max planes. The US Justice Department said the firm chose "profit over candour"”
My hypothesis about the 737 MAX is because the FAA advanced its safety standards so much that it made sense to keep building older designs at a lower cost, which are for some reason grandfathered.
Carmakers can’t mass produce older designs meeting older standards without airbags using “the design was approved in the past” excuse, but that’s totally cool in aviation.
This is the sort of comment I come to HN for and hate that I come to HN for: rational, pragmatic, realistic, savvy, read the article, and
Fuck the world doesn’t have to be like this.
This Byzantine maze puzzle of inherited wealth and hopeless inequality and every part of it does feel inevitable and it feels naive to the point of stupid that anything could be reformed.
But I try to remember that it’s all pretty made up north of the actual physics. We put up with this because we’re collectively agreeing to.
Rather than spending more time on-line, stewing in negative emotions over the cardinality of { Imperfection in world | solving Imperfection appears ~impossible or unrealistic } ...perhaps it would feel better if you did some regular volunteering in meatspace? There's probably a soup kitchen / food bank / public park / animal shelter / school / whatever near you, where your help would have immediate and obvious benefits.
We are now doing that. Planes with ADS-B send out their position, altitude, direction and speed every eight seconds. That's how flightradar24 tracks most airplanes. ADS-B has been introduced sometime in the mid-2000s, and became mandatory in many countries in 2020. It originally depended on ground receivers or other aircraft picking up the transmission though, which is an issue if a plane goes missing in the middle of an ocean. This seems to be mostly solved now by satellites equiped with receivers.
Just FYI that not all countries require equipment for space based ADSB ( like the USA ). Many of our commercial airliners have it but mostly in the name of travel abroad.
- ADS-B can be broadcast on two frequencies (978 MHz and 1090 MHz). FAA requires aircraft operating above 18000 feet to use 1090, while either may be used by craft flying lower. (It seems like the equipment is less expensive). This means 1090 is used more heavily by large commercial craft and so 1090 is the only band the satellites currently listen to.
- Smaller private craft sometimes use belly-mounted antennas and so their hull can block signal propagation upwards
historically, aircraft have those antennas mounted on their belly and with low power they blast them at the ground for powerful receivers to catch. For "ADS-B Diversity", which is the space based version, on a generic Cessna 172 that meets current ADS-B requirements, I would need to rip out my current ADS-B system and replace it with a $9,000 (plus labor) ADS-B system that has dual broadcasting antennas. I think the top mount antenna is also more powerful but I honestly do not know.
Space based ADSB only improves coverage for mountain ranges and oceans. It's mission in a mountainous situation is to fill the gap when radar coverage is lost but you have low altitude (in relation to ground, not sea level) traffic, such as arriving and departing traffic.
assuming this map is accurate, you can appreciate how aircraft below 15,000 ft would be constantly falling in and out of ADS-B coverage if they themselves were changing altitude.
But the ocean is an other matter entirely, water is great at absorbing radio waves, and when a plane crashes and breaks up over deep waters the currents can carry far and disperse wide.
How tiny a percent of airline flight outcomes would be substantially improved by any sounds-good change to the Black Boxes?
Sticking with the status quo sounds pretty optimal to me.
(After several cool-sounding stories of crashes, the article comes to a similar conclusion.)