It seems to me that the old "black box" method of determining the cause of a plane crash is miserable. First they have to find the damned thing. Then they have to pray that it isn't damaged beyond redemption. How about this:
In this packet switched, Wi-Fi, cellularized blue-tooth world of ours, there must be some way for two planes traveling near each other to hand off their current flight info (flap settings, engine stuff, air speed, etc.) This could happen everytime two planes were in range (range being defined by the choice of technology.) For that matter, there is no reason that planes couldn't broadcast all of their pertinent data to ALL of the other planes within range, or even to ground stations in areas around airports, where most accidents seem to happen on take-off or landing anyway.
Such a system could supplement the current black boxes, or even replace them. I suppose a satellite relay system could also be used. The point here is that the necessary data doesn't go down with the plane. It is just fed to other planes or ground stations or whatever, and is easily retrievable, perhaps instantaneously. If GPS positioning were incorporated into the system, then "vanished" planes probably wouldn't stay vanished for very long.
Another advantage of this is that black boxes really store very little data, and only for a very short time (I believe it is just a few thousand pieces of data, and the tape that stores it loops over itself after 30 minutes.) With digital sensors and no need for storage on a mechanical medium (by which I mean a tape,) the data capacity could be hugely increased and the system could track all relevant data for the entire trip. Hard drives are cheap as dirt these days, and if my Tivo can record 40 hours of high quality TV (lots of pixels there, each represented by a bit or two of data,) then this kind of system could certainly track ALL of the data from a 7 hour flight, or two, or three. This might include data that probably isn't currently tracked, such as the status of the cockpit door, the smoke detector in the lav, ambient temperatures and pressures throughout the plane, etc. Perhaps the data would be divvied up between passing planes, but it could be easily reassembled by the proper software. After all, that is what the Internet does every day with data packets. And except for the occasional network slowdown, it does it quite well. Hell, I know that there are privacy concerns, but there is no technical impediment to adding a video of the entire flight (cabin and passenger space as well.)
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Easier/better would be to maintain communication with earth receiving stations, or by satellite.
The Pilot union would never allow this. The comparison is analagous to an airbag deployment computer.
The airbag computer needs to know how fast the car is traveling. Therefore, it monitors several parameters; speed, throttle position and brake petal position. These parameters are monitored continuously, but recorded for 5 seconds before a crash. The recording is meant for factory technicians to verify that the airbag fired correctly, or to give detailed background information if the airbag fired incorrectly.
There has been a reckless driving conviction based upon data from an airbag computer. It seems that the driver was going 120 mph (in a residential neighborhood), and for the last 4 seconds of his victim's life the gas petal was to the floor. One second before he killed her, he did not break, he lifted his foot of the gas petal.
I think he got murder 2.
Would more data have been better? what was he doing 10 seconds before the accident? How long had he been traveling at 120 mph? was this the first time he had done this? All of these questions would be answered by continuous recording.
When you are pulled over by the cops they can search your car "with reasonable suspicion".
If you had continuous monitoring, it would show that you had been going 46 mph in the 45, or (gasp) blown through that school zone traveling 22 mph. or failed to use your turn signal on numerous occasions. All of your transgressions would be captured, available to law enforcement upon your first traffic stop.
Couple the velocity profile of your vehicle with mapquest and they can determine where you have been, when, how many times, and how long you stayed.
Would you want the cops to have that information? The cops don't want you to have that information about them... (so, office smiley, we see that last night you stopped at dunkin donuts for 3 hours...).
Pilots don't want it either. Sure, it may reduce the time lag between the crash and the time the crash investigators get flight data, but at what cost. It causes so many privacy concerns.
It is like having your boss watch your every keystroke. literally. It is having every decision questioned. every move second-guessed. every maneuver analyzed for the slightest reason to let you go.
In other words, welcome to 1984.
Just because it is technically possible doesn't make it a good idea.
-red
There are two "black boxes." (Actually, they're high-visibility colors like blaze orange.) One, the cockpit recorder, records the cockpit conversation in the last few moments of flight- I think it's 30 seconds. The other is the "flight data recorder," and it does record every bit of information about an aircraft's flight- changes in direction, attitude, speed, amount of thrust, etc. The ones in use today are infinitely better than the ones of just 10 years ago.The boxes are designed to withstand heat, immersion in water, and accelerations to something over 200G. They're very, very tough.The information recorded has to compared to the forensic crash analysis, which may involve actually rebuilding the aircraft to see what mechanical parts were damaged or failed in flight. That's the procedure that takes so long, and that's the part you want done right. Hurrying the process can only result in a "rush to judgement," and the obscuring of the truth.I would prefer to wait a few more days or weeks to be confident that the investigation was done professionally and thoroughly and accurately.
One drawback of a networked flight data acquisition system is that the single flight data captured by numerous airplanes in flight would need to be stored until the flight in question safely arrived at its destination. Additionally, some accidents evolve over time (during a single flight) and its important that the flight data recorder capture throttle, control surface, flight orientation in very short time periods. Even though this idea may not be viable for accident investigation, it may be valuable in other ways. For example, air turbulence detection, head winds, wind shear (approach and take-off), etc.
The reason the 'black box' normally records the last 20 minutes over and over is that the time from problem to crash, where the pilot cannot report it on the radio, is sometimes very short. Shockingly so. I recall a video reenactment of a 737 crash, where it was likely caught in wake turbulence. The time from smooth flight, to fatal impact, was probably less than 60 seconds. Hence, while transferring data is a good idea, you have to be transferring it continuously (to a sattelite maybe), otherwise it won't work.
I.e. a plane over the south Pacific, 100 miles from nowhere, has an engine blow, the plane heels over, crashes in 3 minutes or less. But because there was no other plane or ground station nearby in those 3 minutes, the data was never transferred and nobody can learn the cause of the crash because there is no black box to retrieve.
Most aircraft accidents involve FAR more than what the black boxes can record. Also, the black box information can be relatively lacking in relevant data. A thorough examination of major crashes will always takes months and years. It simply isn't practical.