That Egypt Air 804 has not be found, yet, drives home that any flights over water should have a satellite beacon that periodically 'phones home' with GPS ephemeris (longitude, latitude, altitude) and primary flight metrics, airspeed, engine metric(s), crew status. It needs to be a system that is always on with a battery back-up. Loss of aircraft power should put the unit in data-burst mode. Only landing gear weight should turn the system OFF and ON. In effect, a radio based, black-box. Bob Wilson
You can't get the majority of passengers to pay $25 for a bag, who is going to pay extra for tracking when even with all the crashes in the news it is still one of the safest ways to get from A to B? And then of course you also have airlines who can't be bothered to spend money on new planes or retrofit them, but will prefer to pay deferred maintenance costs and extend the life of the plane for many extra decades. With about $25 worth of kit at retail consumer price levels and a weekend of coding on a hosting server for the backend, there could be a system to do exactly that. No it wouldn't survive a crash, but it lets you know where it stopped working...
irrelevant in this case, the plane was tracked by Greek radars. then you pay the satellite subscription to use it. as you might remember the missing Malaysian flight had the hardware, but not the subscription.
Yes. But a satellite internet link with minimal bandwidth (we're sending KB's of data, not streaming 4K cat videos) is on a consumer level, a few hundred dollars a month. The "Staralliance" alliance has 18,521 daily flights as of early spring last year, with an average daily passenger load of 1,791,260 people (just less than 100 per flight on average). Multiply by 30 and you've got 53.73 million people every month. If air fares raised one penny per person, that's $537K per month. I believe that would pay for a satellite com link especially on such a large scale.
FDR and CVR are very robust but lack latest technology. This list is incomplete: List of unrecovered flight recorders - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Someday a decision point will be reached. Or has it already? Build the recorders even better, or replace the system with enroute satellite data offloading. I really don't know what would be involved to make that decision.
Yeah, but with as infrequent as these events are, it's easier to let the lawyers bill a little more "on demand", raise the fares anyway (why stop at 1ยข?) and pocket a few million per month as profit. That's how you look after your shareholders, after all. 2PS64 ?
Perhaps the technology is all in place and just awaiting 1 (or more) airlines to buy in. I could imagine a marketing scheme "We have slightly higher ticket prices but are leading the industry in safety innovation". Even though it is the safest transportation tool, commercial jet travel is feared. Irrationalia can often be viewed as money-making opportunities. This is also looking after shareholders.
Hmmmmm....you mean they never recovered the [sic]Black Boxes from the WTC???? Ooooooooooooooo. I'm surprised that the aluminum-foil hat crowd hasn't made more of a case about that one!
Or the time between pings was log of SOC. Also two electrodes that in sea water makes a primary cell. Then a listen before response long duration mode. Cheaper to sat broadcast metrics. Bob Wilson
interesting speculation on smoke alerts: Smoke Alerts Like That on Flight 804 Have Raised Questions in the Past - WSJ
