Yemen Air Crash

I think i read that this plane crashed in the ocean. If they are unable to find the flight recorders from this plane, there is going to be a lot of talk about redesigning how the recorders are made with regards to their battery life and their ability to be found in the water.

If two planes go down in the ocean and you cannot find either plane's flight recorders, something probably needs to be done.

It must be a nightmare at airbus right now.

RIP to all the pax and crew.
 
I think i read that this plane crashed in the ocean. If they are unable to find the flight recorders from this plane, there is going to be a lot of talk about redesigning how the recorders are made with regards to their battery life and their ability to be found in the water.

If two planes go down in the ocean and you cannot find either plane's flight recorders, something probably needs to be done.

It must be a nightmare at airbus right now.

RIP to all the pax and crew.

No doubt ... it's not like there are redundant fleets of vessels that can search for wreckage in 3,500m-deep water.
 
Make the recorders float with a water activated switch, and enable GPS tracking on them.
GPS will not work underwater and even if the boxes did float, which is a good idea, the chances are it would be bolted to a part of the fuselage that does not float.
 
I could see a separate (from the CVR/FDR), deployable beacon as a possibility.

The biggest problem I can think of is: Other than an "OH !" button, how would it know when to deploy just before a crash?

Accelerometer-activated airbags are ubiquitous in cars, so maybe it isn't rocket science (well ... the deployable part might be :)).
 
I know it is not rational, but it seems everytime my family travels internationally, this happens. Last year it was Spanair, two days before they headed to Madrid. This stinks! RIP
 
As we've seen with the Air France crash a lot of modern aircraft are capable of transmitting real time data via satellite back to their respective operations centers. It may be that a simple solution is simply increasing those transmissions, i.e. sending more data. The advent of broadband internet access on some commercial flights means that there's large amounts of bandwidth becoming available on some of these flights.

A complicating factor is these latest two incidents is that they've occurred in parts of the world without a lot of satellite coverage (I think).

Anyone know the amount of data that a FDR records in a given amount of time?
 
Both crashes were near the equator, in prime view of geostationary sats. I don't know who provides the datalink services, maybe inmarsat?
 
Anyone know the amount of data that a FDR records in a given amount of time?

Wellsir, your average A330 records ARINC 717 data to the DFDR at a rate of 256 12-bit words per second. So, it's recording 384 bytes/second ... not massive at all, mostly because the digital data recording standards were drafted about five years before ColecoVision† existed (i.e., the mid-70s).

Depending on the kind of data being sent (raw ARINC 429 vs 717), the data rate to sample a 1 Hz parameter will average between 4 bytes/sec to 1.5 bytes/sec, plus whatever wrappers the transmission protocol adds on. However, 429 is on the way out, in favor of AFDX, which supports larger payloads and gives access to many more "talkers", so keep upping the bandwidth required.

Being older, an A310 may be only doing 96 or maybe 192 bytes/sec, depending on how extensively the data acquisition unit is wired (meaning the number of parameters available to be recorded ... less is cheaper and the deciding factor is usually easiest compliance with the laws in the country of registry). The A380 records data at four times the rate of the A330 (1.5 kB/sec) to be compliant with newer requirement for sampling frequency of the control surfaces. The 787 will be the first aircraft to use a new generation of recording technology (ARINC 647), where the bandwidth requirements will be somewhat greater and more variable with time and events on the aircraft, but still not very large compared to streaming video or WiFi support.

A manufacturer has, in the past (when they were offering the service), considered implementing real-time telemetry via a datalink. But that was more as a deal-sweetener for maintenance use, in conjunction with offering WiFi and video on-demand (the revenue generating stuff).

†I found out that "Coleco" is short for the Connecticut Leather Company (founded 1932). That's interesting to me because "Tandy Computers" also started life as the Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company in 1919 (They still have a leather supply store in town). I think it would have been awesome to have a leather computer case.

Erm, back to the Yemen Air crash. :p
 
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