Why Dont Planes Upload Black Box Information
In their quest to uncover what caused an EgyptAir jetliner'southward fatal plunge into the Mediterranean Sea this calendar month, searchers are conducting a costly, fourth dimension-consuming hunt for the jet'south black box data recorders.
Just in an historic period where digital data tin can exist easily transmitted and stored remotely, the use of blackness boxes to record disquisitional flying data increasingly strikes many experts as antiquated. In fact, the technology already exists to stream the aircraft's information to a footing computer or virtual "cloud" — it just hasn't been widely adopted.
Why are airlines balking? The biggest barrier, manufacture observers say, is cost.
FLYHT Aerospace Solutions in Canada provides an on-demand black box streaming service at near $100,000 per plane, including hardware and installation. The company says it has over 50 customers and is already installed in nearly 400 planes. Canada'southward Starting time Air is the merely airline to say publicly it is using the FLYHT system.
The system doesn't continuously transport information to footing-based computers. Instead, it activates in the event of an abnormal occurrence, then quickly sends a torrent of data to the airline for analysis and to utilize corrective action.
"In the result something goes wrong, we tin can provide quicker insight into what happened," said Graham Ingham, a former Skyservice Airlines managing director who now works for FLYHT. "We tin can get-go piecing the puzzle together quicker, and so (the airline) can lay to rest some of the conspiracies that are out there."
The streaming devices are like to the blackness box hardware that has been used in shipping for decades. Those devices consist of a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder — each of which can provide indispensable information, including ambient noises and the flight'south airspeed, altitude and management, in the issue of an accident.
FLYHT's program — dubbed the Automated Flight Information Reporting Arrangement — substantially duplicates the information that's typically found in the flight data recorder.
Many more commercial airliners are equipped with a technology called Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Organization, which provides some data — though less than FLYHT's organization — to the basis in real time.
During an emergency, FLYHT's arrangement will automatically send back crucial flight-related information as well as provide the plane'south position in real time — particularly helpful if the flight is on a transoceanic journey where flight control systems can lose rails of information technology.
If a plane does crash, the data tin help searchers pinpoint a more specific search location, Ingham said.
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It besides could help investigators make up one's mind whether a catastrophic upshot such every bit an explosion occurred, he said, as the data received would likely show a loss of cabin pressure. The aeroplane would continue to send data just every bit long every bit the aircraft however had power, he added.
Ingham stressed that streaming copious amounts of information to ground-based computers does not make the technology cost-prohibitive. Airlines must also pay a "few dollars" per minute to access the data, just that would amount to a "minimal" cost, he said, considering an emergency doesn't typically last long.
And he doesn't believe the airlines would need to pass the costs on to consumers.
"It is not very often that an aircraft is in a position that would require it to live stream the black box," Ingham said. "Airline travel is very safe these days and continues to become better."
It isn't known how many planes are equipped with streaming technology to provide black box quality data to computers on the ground, but it's believed to be a small fraction of the commercial aircraft armada, observers say. Qatar Airways announced last twelvemonth it would introduce the technology into its fleet via the British satellite telecom company Inmarsat.
Other airlines are having to weigh whether the applied science makes sense because crashes are and so rare and accept fallen to their lowest levels in recent years.
In 2015, there was i crash for every three.one meg flights worldwide — the safest year on record, co-ordinate to the International Air Transport Association.
Airlines for America, the trade grouping for the nation'southward air carriers, declined to comment on the need for live streaming of the data since at that place is no formal proposal in forepart of the FAA to require it.
Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and author of "Cockpit Confidential," said real-time tracking of commercial jets is useful, but real-time streaming of information is "fraught with complications."
"It'd be ... not especially useful except in those very rare instances when the black box recorders tin can't be plant," he said in an email. "You lot have about 16 million commercial flights operating each year, virtually none of which disappear. Is this actually the best manner to spend our air safety dollars?"
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Smith said there are also questions about who would maintain the streamed data and where information technology would exist kept. (In the case of FLYHT, the information is sent to a secure server and belongs to the airline, Ingham said.)
Jim Hall, who served as the National Transportation Safety Lath chairman from 1994 to 2001, said black boxes still take a purpose because they tin can be retrieved by contained investigators without the worry they would exist tampered with or altered.
"If there'southward that much information being streamed, who gets it?" Hall asked. "If it'south a black box, it's supposed to be in the easily of the investigators."
In addition to streaming, Hall has suggested getting cameras within cockpits, which pilot unions accept opposed, and using ejectible recorders that would float, making it easier to find and recover them in the effect of a crash at sea.
"The biggest problem with the black box now is that they tin can sink with the aeroplane to the bottom of the sea," Hall said. "And so it can take weeks and millions of dollars to observe information technology."
Investigators are still looking for the fuselage and black boxes of EgyptAir Flying 804 afterward it crashed May xix with 66 people on board.
Nor have searchers found the fuselage or black boxes of Malaysia Airlines Flying MH370 since information technology went missing in March 2014. The cost of the search operation for the plane in a remote section of the Indian Sea is reportedly at $130 million, making information technology the nigh-expensive search in aviation history.
The Air Line Pilots Association, International, the world's largest pilot union, told NBC News that the two accidents "underscore the importance of equipping all shipping with tracking technology that can pinpoint location in most real fourth dimension."
Spurred by the MH370 mystery, more planes are due to get such applied science after the U.N.'s aviation agency in March canonical a proposal for all newly designed aircraft to carry tracking devices that can transmit their location at least once a minute in an emergency. That won't become into upshot until 2021.
The contempo uptick in instances of missing planes and black boxes could strength airlines to re-examine live data streaming sooner than later on, said aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia.
"Information technology'll happen," he said. "The engineering science change is outpacing regulatory change."
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/egyptair-crash/some-airlines-stream-black-box-data-cost-keeps-others-offline-n580966
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