Yes. I am astonished that you do not already know that.
On 9-11, the combined maximal efforts of civilian and military aviation were unable to locate four airliners because their transponders were turned off. This occurred near the New York and DC metropolitan areas, some of the most carefully controlled air space in the world.
Without a transponder, an aircraft is just a raw radar return among, potentially, hundreds or thousands of other returns from civilian and military aircraft, weather, birds, balloons etc. Add to that glitches, ghosts and anomalies in busy air space and it is not surprising that a large aircraft without a transponder can hide in plain sight.
There was no real problem locating the four airliners hijacked on 9/11. In fact, one of them (United 175) didn't even turn its transponder off. The other three were adequately tracked with primary radar. The problems with the airliners that day were deciding what to do about them (e.g. intercept them) and then actually doing it (e.g. no procedures were in place to quickly scramble fighters in a case like this).
Primary radar is difficult and inconvenient but it's not nearly as difficult as you make it sound.
This is not true; the difficulty in using raw radar returns to manage and defend the domestic airspace was the primary reason the FAA grounded all civilian aircraft on 9/11--to clean up the scopes.
Andrews scrambled two (unarmed) F-16s to intercept flight 93; they just followed the Potomac north because no one knew where that plane was. Even after the PA crash was confirmed, those fighters spent hours contacting radar returns to check them out and get them to land.
That just shows that primary radar is difficult to use, and that it's hard to track a plane on radar after it's crashed. I'm not disputing that. Perhaps "no real problem" was bad phrasing, what I meant was that they were able to track them and they were not "unable to locate" the planes.
The black boxes are fine. ACARS/ADS-B are usually helpful, just not in this case, so far as we know.
There is already a perfectly capable technology in place: the 406 MHz ELT. If it turns out the the (probably two) ELTs did not transmit, we need to think about why.
Things can go bad quickly on a commercial jet. No one has time to manually activate the ELT before a sudden impact.
At least one of the ELTs is required to activate automatically in case of an impact. A hard landing is enough.
So why did at least one of the ELTs not activate? here are some possibilities:
1) It did, and we don't know about it. The media is so ignorant about the details of technological systems that they don't know the questions to ask, cannot understand the relevance of technical details, and would not understand the answers in any case. Welcome to the idiocracy.
2) An ELT activated, but was not picked up. Very unlikely. If an ELT activated aboard MH370, the satellites would almost certainly have received the signal and passed it on.
3) The aircraft hit the water intact, and the ELTs were destroyed before they could activate.
We can't do anything about the stupidity of the media except to educate ourselves, stop consuming media garbage, and hope that, eventually, the human condition will improve.
If option (3) is correct, then we can also do nothing. Any force sufficient to interfere with the safe operation of the aircraft by competent pilots should also have been sufficient to activate an ELT.
If the ELT did not activate, it means that the aircraft was flyable. We cannot adjust the sensitivity of the ELTs to activate on flyable aircraft, because the rate of false activations would be unacceptable.
Apparently, we also cannot eliminate the impact of flyable aircraft with terrain by pilot training; quite the contrary--the phenomenon seems to be increasing.
Improved autopilots are also not the answer. Of necessity, an autopilot must relinquish control to human pilots in many circumstances where anomalous data is received. This is the circumstance in which it is most likely that the human pilot, taking control of a partially disabled aircraft, often at night and over water, will crash a flyable aircraft into terrain. There has been a growing series of such accidents.
So, no, we do not need to rethink "black boxes". They do their job very well. We also do not need to rethink the ELT--it is a very reliable technology except when people crash a flyable aircraft.
We may want to continue to upgrade the packet data rate between the aircraft and its base, but that is already the plan.
We also cannot upgrade the autopilot, because we cannot yet create artificial intelligence that can deal with a chaotic system like a partially disabled aircraft.
We may want to think about giving pilots better ways of seeing an overview of their situation. Mandatory AOA indicators and external-view situation indicators would be a great start.
Probably also rethinking reflexive media coverage of aviation would be good. Our need to know immediately does not trump the well-thought-out engineering of commercial airliners, and pandering to our self-absorbed search for meaning and quick fixes, particularly when none is available, is likely degrade, rather than improve, the human condition.
The numbers only become science-fictiony large if you want to go fast. Why not go slowly?
The only reason humanity is obsessed with speed is because of our short life spans, but that is a solvable problem.
All we have to do is to eliminate aging and it's associated diseases, and then we can take our time going to the stars.
The most difficult part may be accepting limits upon our appetites, so that we are not driven to consume everything and we can live sustainably. This is an issue aboard a starship, where we will have to take a chill pill on consumption of resources, just as it is an issue on starship Earth.
Ignoring the whole "we'll just cure mortality...how hard can it be?", people tend to go batshit crazy after spending a couple of months in confined conditions looking at the same faces day after day. Think they're going to do better mentally when they look forward to the same for a 100 years.
Then we have to address this newly pinpointed problem - to somehow make people not „go batshit crazy”. Maybe practicing some kind of meditation? I admit that it's not as exciting as some technical overhaul we all expect, but still...
Your lovely neighbours cannot be correct except by chance; if there was any validity to their predictions, it would imply not just that they knew the future of the weather, but that the future of the weather was knowable, which it certainly is not. Your tendency to see their predictions as accurate is likely a conflation of your confirmation bias and your choice-supportive bias.
Humans naturally search for meaning in chaos. That is all that their observations of caterpillars and trees and birds amounts to. They are trying to attach significance to a chaotic universe in order to reassure themselves that their place in the world makes sense. It does not. This is mathematically verifiable.
If the birds and the caterpillars and the apple trees could know the future of chaotic systems, it would imply that we live in a deterministic universe where birds and caterpillars and apple trees could not exist. QED.
"If the birds and the caterpillars and the apple trees could know the future of chaotic systems, it would imply that we live in a deterministic universe where birds and caterpillars and apple trees could not exist. QED."
Complex dynamics 101: life is a complex dynamical system. If the math of chaos is wrong, the processes underlying life would not operate as they do. Life would not exist as we observe it.
Also, your iPad would not work. As I said, QED. This is not controversial.
Or, perhaps that weather has cycles and is not an uncorrelated random walk, and that 50 years of living with your life strongly influenced by the weather, along with several lifetimes of your parents' wisdom gives some insight into deep patterns of nature that are not readily apparent. Perhaps these persistent stories about old people predicting things based on caterpillars and trick knees are hints that the world might be more complicated than you think. And if you aren't so quick to assume that you understand the world because you think you understand a theory, you might investigate these hints. Maybe you will find out that there is something actually going on, and you'll have an exciting new world to explore.
"it would imply that we live in a deterministic universe..."
You say this as though it's impossible. You may not believe we live in a deterministic universe, but, that's just, like, your opinion, man. The rational stance (I think) is to: (1) admit you don't know, (2) acknowledge the possibility of a deterministic universe, (3) for whatever chance the universe is deterministic, delude yourself into believing that it's not, because the illusion of free will is probably good for your mental health.
I think you're doing #3 really well, but skipped over #1 and #2.
That is because the weather is a chaotic system. It is governed by the mathematics of complex dynamics.
Predictions diminish in accuracy with increasing time because the number of inputs rapidly approaches infinity, and each one of them can turn out to be determinative of the overall behaviour of the system.
It should be no surprise to any scientifically literate person that a weather forecast issued in October has no validity by January. Any resemblance to reality is purely accounted for by chance.
This is not amenable to the Mr. Fix-It mentality that inevitably shows up in these discussions. There is good reason to believe that weather prediction will never improve, no matter what the scientific and technological developments, because the future of a chaotic system is mathematically intractable and genuinely unknowable.
The same argument applies to climate science. I'm sorry to bring you the very bad news that we live in a chaotic universe, not a deterministic one. Get over it. Wear a helmet.
Edit: The mysterious part is that the scientists at the so-called Climate Prediction Center would issue a 3-month forecast. What part of complex dynamics did they not understand? Sometimes an expert is just a guy with slides.
Prediction centers might not be able to tell the exact date and place of a storm that far out, but they can at least tell if a season is going to be bad well ahead of time.
Edit: It says this right in the article: climate forecasters focus on things that change more slowly, such as temperatures of the land and oceans... they try to say whether a given three-month period will be wetter, drier, hotter, or colder than average.
I'm sorry, what part of complex dynamics did you not understand?
It doesn't matter how slowly things change. It doesn't matter how big the inputs are. Complex dynamics teaches us that scale does not matter; very small inputs can and do end up being more important than very large inputs.
I'll say it again: scale does not matter.
No, they cannot tell if a season is going bad well ahead of time. It is a fallacy to think that they can. They can tell that a season is going bad exactly at the moment the season starts to go bad.
Why is it that every time I raise the issue of the unknowable future of chaotic systems that people down-vote me? Is it so hard for you to accept? Check the math and the science: it is sound. I am sorry you do not like it, but the mathematics of chaos is not some fringe idea. It underlies everything. I'm astonished that so few people have noticed this.
Chaos theory does not mean that literally anything can happen. Weather changes are still bounded by energy inputs and outputs. It can't rain if the humidity in the air is too low. The jetstream isn't just going to reverse course anytime soon, although it is shifting slowly. It's physically impossible to have snow if the weather is too warm - complex dynamics can't change that. I'm not saying a forecast will never be wrong, but not every case is an edge case. With good data and a useful model, you can be right most of the time.
You are taking an extreme stance on the topic. There's room for modeling and forecasting even in highly complex dynamical systems, the models are getting better with advances in applied statistics research. They are not perfect, but they are not completely useless either.
For example, here's an article I just found on modeling stochastic nonlinear dynamics in ecological/oceanographic applications:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.1717.pdf
As for caterpillars predicting climate patterns, I agree with you that it's unlikely, unless there are some simple environmental indicators the caterpillars learnt/evolved to take into account but we humans haven't paid attention to yet. This doesn't mean the changes are unknowable.
A ridiculous measure, because it depends upon the definition of "correct", which is an arbitrary reduction of continuous data to a single axis, and because the scoring is conducted by those who have a vested interest in the outcome, and that's just for starters.
How about applying some statistics, like the probability that a correct forecast (whatever that is) could be accounted for by chance, given the population of forecasts and conditions in which it takes place? P-values have their limitations, but that's no reason to discard them entirely.
Many problems must be solved before they can exist.
(1) Only suitable material for the cable is, at the moment, unobtanium.
(2) Cable must be moved continuously to dodge debris and satellites whose orbits cross the equator (all of them except those in geosynchronous orbit).
(3) The cable, elevator module and any cargo or people must pass through the Van Allen belts, which will degrade them. People don't respond well to degradation by radiation.
The problems created by radiation in the Van Allen belts are vastly overstated. The funny part is, this is due in part to fake Moon landing conspiracy theorists, who use the radiation as a "supporting argument".
My understanding is that satellites that plan on spending significant time in the Van Allen belts need to take countermeasures. Is that not the case, or is it only relevant to things like sensitive electronics?
This is what happens when police officers get confused about their job. Their job is to serve and protect, but sometimes they think their job is to pound down the nails.
This is idiotica: a ridiculous attempt at a tie-in between pseudoscience and a topical event. it is a waste of time and effort for the reader, the writer, and the researcher.
Climate science is bullshit because it is not science; it is an observational discipline that cloaks itself in the language of science. Calling it science is simply an expression of our vastly inflated impression of ourselves.
Oh, we are severely fucking up this planet, don't get me wrong, we just don't have the tools to prove it scientifically yet. Pretending that we do is just going to make things worse.
The only purposes that this article can serve are to raise the profile of the researcher for tenure-track consideration, and to make money for the newspaper that is shilling for the consumerism that is causing the environmental problem in the first place.
If you are concerned about the planet, don't waste your time with this article. Instead, here's a list of things you can do that would actually make a difference:
(1) Stop having children.
(2) Promote mandatory population control.
(3) Stop driving your gas-powered car.
(4) Stop eating in restaurants.
(5) Stop buying stuff in disposable plastic containers.
(6) Stop spending so much money, you fucking assholes--you are driving the machine that is tearing up the Earth.
