Malayan Airliner

I think Linc meant why they should oppose it.There really shouldn’t be a choice in such a safety critical role.People make and will always make mistakes ,you will never eradicate them entirely BUT you can learn.If nothing else the data recorders should be used as a teaching aid /learning tool for future incident prevention.

And that answer Chas,begs the question, as to why they should?.

Um, why they should what? Accept it, oppose it, what?

Why don’t they ask the passengers what they’d favour…? Not crashing in the first place, I’d wager!;o)

Linc, if you work your way back through here or the main thread in Commercial, you’ll find the relevant exchanges relating to the subject….:)

And that answer Chas,begs the question, as to why they should?.
Jim.
Lincoln .7

As discussed elsewhere, the pilots are opposed to it.

The CVR usually – or used to – only give the last half hour of audio: there has to be the ability now to record the whole flight…? Same with the FDR, since the basic thinking was that the airliner would have some sort of catastrophic failure, crash immediately, and it would all be recorded and easily solved.

These days there must be the ability to store billions of terabytes of info in something the size of the standard black box, but there has to be the demand from the airlines and backing from the authorities before that sort of thing is brought in.

The black boxes will not tell necessarily you what happened per se, the voice one simply rewrites every couple of hours, so will have nothing on it regarding when it all happened, the other will just give you parameters, but not what caused those to happen, such as turning stuff off etc…. the cockpit voice may have had some inclination as to what happened, but that time period would have been overwritten.. if it’s depressurised that will tell you if it was manual or accidental etc.

But you know as well as I do that (probably) the first thing the authorities will do, once the ‘dust’ has settled, is insist that nothing needs to change because this was the first and only time that this has happened therefore it does not warrant the expenditure.

I hope they find it soon.I also hope they have a major rethink on the black box and transponder life cycle and the lack of overriding them.

“Search teams are preparing to use a mini-submarine to scan the sea bed for wreckage from flight MH370.

Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, leading the search, told a news conference an oil slick had been found within the current search zone of the southern Indian Ocean.

He cautioned that the use of HMS Echo’s unmanned submarine, Bluefin-21, should not raise hopes that debris from the aircraft will be found.”

Well, there have been no ‘pings’ heard since last Tuesday – five days ago – and the batteries only last a month.
Guess its back to needle-in-a-haystack-on-hands-and-knees-in-the-dark time again…

Yes, south west of Perth – over 23,000 ft.

Titanic is about 2 miles down.

I read somewhere that there are one or two trenches in the Indian Ocean that go down 20,000 feet. That’s, as near as makes no difference, 4 miles.

Was’t the Titanic in even deeper water?, granted though, they did have a rough idea as to where to look, and had the technology to go down and give her a look over.
Jim
Lincoln .7

The pingers on the “Black boxes” only have a max 5 mile range underwater. And I may be exaggerating there. I don’t have the exact figures to hand.
In deep water, you literally have to be right on top of the recorder with no other noise pollution to detect it by sonar or listening devices.
This of course means, they need to know where to look!

With the Air France flight 447 wreck, they literally stumbled across it while conducting a search pattern. That was 2 years after they were able to narrow the search area to a 10,000 square mile chunk of the Atlantic.

What the searchers are face with in this instance however is the entire Indian Ocean. Millions of square miles of deep water with troughs/canyons plunging to 20,000 feet or more. And if it’s in one of those, forget ever finding it!

BUT the problem with the Malayan crash is that they can’t find signals from the plane or black box…

I wonder whether the sophisticated sonar equipment on a nuclear submarine would be able to find the ‘black boxes’ if they are fitted with some sort of transponder, now that a rough area of search has been established. I know the ‘black box’ transponder is not a powerful signal (due to the available battery power) but surely a passive sonar designed to find other submarines that are specifically designed not to radiate sound would give the best chance?

Until the black box says what happened…

But the black box may not tell the investigators what they really want to know: why it happened.

As usual, the ‘black box’ has become something of an obsession for the media whereas for the investigation team it will only be a small part of the evidence; what we already know is probably more important:

Why were the transponders deliberately switched-off? Why was the autopilot switched-off? Why did the aircraft (apparently) deliberately change course and continue flying for hours when no distress signal was sent? Why was the aircraft (apparently) steered for many hours away from any possible diversion landing opportunity into one of the most remote and inhospitable oceans of the world and beyond the point where it had fuel to divert to anywhere else?

There are only three real possibilities:

Crew incapacitation; but the transponder switch-off, course and course changes would seem to rule that out.

Hijacking; but there have been no claims from any group responsible…..somewhat defeating the object.

Deliberate action by one or both of the pilots.

But the black box is already fitted so the pilots know everything is recorded so nothing has changed.If the pilot is going to commit suicide there’s not alot you can anyway BUT the problem with the Malayan crash is that they cant find signals from the plane or black box–hence the system needs to be that it cant be switched off.

Yes, there is a black box inside every airliner so that investigators can find out what happened (if it was recorded by the black box). But if this was intentional then the pilot (or copilot, whoever) decided to try and hide the evidence by putting it well out of usual reach, at the bottom of a mostly unfrequented corner of the ocean where it would be difficult to track down. That was why I suggested a thingy (complete with alarms, etc), which would be difficult to turn off, to relay a GPS location so that it would be easier to find the wreckage…

Until the black box says what happened i feel it’s unfair to blame the pilot-his family must be going through the mill already yet he may be a victim the same as all the others.

Yes, that was why I said ‘if’.
On the other hand it might have been abducted by flying saucers, just as likely a scenario at the moment until something proves otherwise. Cue the loony finger pointing…

There seems a lot of belief in black boxes, but have they been updated recently? It used to be that they only held the last 30mins of info; if nothing was said and there were no control inputs (the airliner being allowed to take itself down for its final ‘landing’) then all it might be able to tell us was that it was quiet and nobody did anything…

Hear hear to the last point. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But the black box is already fitted so the pilots know everything is recorded so nothing has changed.If the pilot is going to commit suicide there’s not alot you can anyway BUT the problem with the Malayan crash is that they cant find signals from the plane or black box–hence the system needs to be that it cant be switched off.
Until the black box says what happened i feel it’s unfair to blame the pilot-his family must be going through the mill already yet he may be a victim the same as all the others.

If this was suicide then it was going down, whether the gubbins was switched on or off. And pilots are going to be edgy because they will think everyone distrusts them now, and especially in the future if they have control of stuff removed from their abilities. At least if the switch off is flagged up then the authorities will know where to look in the event of this sort of thing happening again.