How We Lost Flight MH370

RE: How We Lost Flight MH370

rew — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 06:43:40 GMT

Passengers are transported in airplanes "acceptably safe" and "acceptably on time". If you demand infinite safety, the costs will be infinite too. Nobody will fly and we lose a lot of convenience we get from flying. So: I disagree that every "risk" should be eliminated.

On the other hand, from the sideline it seems that most of the infrastructure to do real-time tracking is already present. So it shouldn't be too costly to implement this. But keep in mind that transporting something on an airplane costs fuel. If you make the airplane 1kg heavier it will consume more fuel just to stay in the air. And then there is maintenance. etc etc. So the costs of such a system is surely more than you and I can fanthom.

RE: How We Lost Flight MH370

rew — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 12:06:16 GMT

Hey DAB,

Suppose your wife says she's going to drive over to her mother at 4 hours away. She could crash a few miles away, and her mother might not raise the alarm until she is an hour late, so you would be "not knowing" of a problem for five hours! Can you force everybody to install GPS tracking and satellite communications systems on all the cars just to be able to inform you of a crash involving your wife?

It is always a cost-benefit analysis.

A different example: Modern Flight Data Recorders (FDRs) record hundreds of parameters of the plane. When a plane crashes you'll always find that one that could have made the investigation easier is missing. For example, the crash of Asiana 214 at San Francisco: The autothrottle turned off 80 seconds before the crash. The reason why was not recorded. Recording why autothrottle systems turn off would help that investigation. So we could force all air planes in the world to upgrade their FDR. Cost to the industry: Lots. Benefit: not a lot. Result: the NTSB has a riddle to solve in this case and in future cases.

REAL safety measures are more important by the way. A measure like "improved FDR" will make the investigation easier, but it won't prevent accidents from happening. OK, in the long run a "solved" accident might lead to measures that prevent future accidents from then on. I just read today that Senators are pushing for immediate and mandatory installation of video recording equipment in trains, because the NTSB has said that it would've made their investigation easier. Immediate compliance for safety reasons!

Not a good argument. We don't have those kinds of accidents on a daily basis. It is not that we must prevent them NOW because next month we'll have had 20 more accidents killing hundreds of people. The system is acceptably safe and if an investigation or a search takes a long time, during that time there are always "it would have been be nice if we'd had XXX installed" arguments.

If there already is a communications system via satellites, and if it would not cost too much bandwidth it would indeed be nice to send the "current position" through that system. For planes not flying, once an hour, for planes flying maybe once every 15 minutes. That would seriously narrow things down.

The bandwidth issue is IMHO a possible problem. I'm not aware of any of the numbers, so I can't even do a ballpark calculation. But there is a significant bitrate of data if ALL planes worldwide would continuously report their position. To buy such bandwidth "via satellite" could be very costly.

RE: How We Lost Flight MH370

DAB — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 18:56:49 GMT

We have the technology to have a recorded track of every aircraft that flies.

GPS is available world wide. It is very easy to put a GPS receiver into a box and install it on every aircraft with a wifi link to the nearest airport/cell tower.

It would then be easy to tie in the ignition switch so that you can NEVER turn off the location signal.

After that, you just tie in tracking software for every aircraft with an instant alert if it veers off track or does anything unexpected.

There should be no reason for an aircraft to fly below radar.

Hopefully, no matter how this mystery plays out we have rules enacted to make 100% track of all commercial aircraft mandatory.

Just my opinion,

DAB