Comment by bgwalter
2 days ago
Does the Flight Data Recorder consider the physical position of the fuel switches or does it get the information from some fly-by-wire part that could be buggy?
The conversation would suggest that the switches were in CUTOFF position, but there is also a display that summarizes the engine status.
There is no conversation that mentions flipping the switch to RUN again.
EDIT: Why is there no Cockpit Video Recorder? The days of limited storage are over.
> EDIT: Why is there no Cockpit Video Recorder? The days of limited storage are over.
Pilots unions are dead against it.
And now some pilots are dead.
Just allow cockpit video recorders, and if they're ever used for anything, the pilots (or their heirs) get $250k in cash.
And Pilots end up dead because of it.
Are you actually using a tragedy like this to launch an assault on organized labour?
What, do you want them to hem and haw and refuse to answer?
Saying the union drove a decision is hardly "an assault on organized labor".
You have to admit this is a smart demagogue!
Why is that outrageous?
[dead]
I've had discussions on HN with people who insisted that having a video camera always pointed out the control tower at the runway was some sort of impossibility. Despite every 7-11 having such a system.
This would leave accident investigators with a lot of work to do to try to figure out how a collision happened.
Yes there is.
Airlines are decades behind on tech. You can get satellite internet almost anywhere on the planet and GPS can give you ten-foot accurate positioning, but we've still _lost_ planes because we haven't mandated a system that sends the realtime position of the plane over the satellite internet. The days of limited storage are still going strong in the industry.
There are reasons they don’t. This is a deceptively difficult problem
Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor
Coverage (different constellations have different coverage, which means planes would not have transmit guarantees depending on flight path). So you’d have huge gaps anyways
There have been alternative solutions posed, some of which are advancing forward. For example, GPS aware ELTs that only transmit below certain altitudes. But even that has flaws
Anyways I think we’ll see it in the next decade or two, but don’t hold your breath
There's somewhere around 15 thousand relevant planes in the air at any time.
If you sent two updates a minute over Iridium, using their 25 byte message plan, you'd be looking at a megabyte per minute for the entire planet. That's such a tiny fraction of what that single constellation can do.
Most airplanes regularly crossing oceans already do have satcom.
The cost of hardware and additional fuel consumption due to drag aren’t nothing, but the data used itself is essentially a rounding error. (Iridium for example has tiny antennas, and SBD data costs about a dollar per kilobyte, and position data is tiny.)
Of course, that’s all little help when a pilot acts adversarial; on MH370, the breakers for both satcom and transponder were likely pulled, for example.
1 reply →
> Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
That’s nonsense. Even when I’m flying right over the north pole my airline will give me unlimited in-flight internet for $20. Maybe antartica has worse reception, but cost isn’t the issue.
> Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
You get free Starlink on several airlines now, so won't that be a solved problem soon?
3 replies →
> Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations)
I can pay $10 to have internet for the entire flight. Reasonably low bandwidth of course, but if I can splurge $10, the airline can.