"Eg e øvejidde", som de sier her. Nok en gang spør jeg hvorfor ikke CPI, som finnes i mange militære fly og i sivile helikoptre, kommer som et krav. Vitsen må jo være å på hurtigst mulig vis finne havaristedet på land eller på sjøen. Deretter kan en lett finne FDR/CVR. Det du kan lese under høres rett og slett tåpelig ut. Floating black box, oh my gawd.
U.S., Europe Differ on Real-Time Aircraft-Tracking
Rules
Airbus to Put New Type of Floating 'Black Boxes' on
Future Models
By ANDY PASZTOR
U.S., European and international
air-safety authorities appear to be heading in different directions when it
comes to requiring real-time tracking of airliners or mandating installation of
video recorders in their cockpits.
The splits, which emerged during a
public forum Tuesday by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, suggest
that global agreement on standards and regulations affecting such key safety
enhancements is likely to be difficult-and most likely will take
years.
The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, isn't currently
drafting rules that would mandate enhanced tracking of planes or putting video
devices inside cockpits to help investigators reconstruct the actions of pilots
following a dangerous incident or accident.
Peggy Gilligan, the FAA's top
safety official, indicated these and some other long-discussed changes would be
hard to justify under current federal cost-benefit trade-offs. She added that
the agency already is working on dozens of other, higher-priority safety rules
that offer more readily quantifiable benefits. It isn't clear, she added, "when
and if" the agency can fit real-time tracking requirements into its
agenda.
A top European Aviation Safety Agency official, by contrast, said
his agency is months away from proposing rules that would call for practically
universal, real-time tracking of aircraft. European lawmakers could take action
on the rules as soon as early next year.
And a senior safety investigator
for the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations,
told the hearing that ICAO is committed to eventually issuing recommendations
for cockpit video recorders even though the process could take
years.
Efforts to ensure the position of all airliners can be tracked
minute-by-minute virtually everywhere around the globe-even over oceans or polar
regions not covered by ground-based radar-emerged in the spotlight after the
disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -1.96% Flight 370 earlier this year.
The presumed crash in March of the Boeing Co. BA -1.78% 777-which still hasn't
been located--also sparked widespread discussion of how to simultaneously
transmit or "stream" certain aircraft-operating data to the ground if pilots
lose control of a plane, major systems fail or some other emergency
occurs.
Before regulators move, though, ICAO and the International Air
Transport Association, the main global airline trade group, are working to come
up with voluntary recommendations for global tracking. They are expected to
focus on technical standards instead of company-specific
technologies.
Tuesday's session was partly intended to influence what has
turned into an industrywide debate on those topics, and partly to get companies
on the record about initiatives they are pursuing to deal with the fallout from
Flight 370.
"There is a future in which we [will] know the fate of every
accident flight," Christopher Hart, the acting NTSB chairman, said as he opened
the forum.
At the same time, Tuesday's session also disclosed that plane
manufacturers, cockpit-equipment makers and satellite-service providers already
seem to have developed a preliminary consensus and are gradually moving, on
their own, to implement early steps to transmit position, speed, altitude and
other data to the ground in case an airliner suffers a catastrophic failure or
goes down for any reason.
In addition, Airbus Group NV disclosed new
efforts designed to make it easier to locate data and voice recorders, typically
referred to as "black boxes," in the event of a crash. Pascal Andrei, a senior
Airbus official, told the NTSB the European plane maker plans to install
deployable black boxes on future A350 and A380 aircraft, intended to eject from
the plane in the event of a crash.
In case the aircraft goes down in
water, the recorders are designed to float. Mr. Andrei said "we are quite
confident" in the technology and those two plane models are slated to have it
installed during assembly. In response to questions about how quickly that might
happen, he said "very soon after some more studies and assessments" are
completed.
The Airbus official also said that in the future, all Airbus
models will be able to trigger transmission of essential operating data to the
ground in case of an emergency or "when we have some suspicious event on board."
Such information about aircraft-pilot interactions would be in addition to
position, speed, altitude and heading data.
In light of the way
communications and computer systems on Airbus planes are configured, Mr. Andrei
said the changes would entail "just a software modification."
Boeing and
avionics supplier Honeywell International Inc., HON -1.84% which also had
officials giving presentations Tuesday, expressed skepticism about deployable
recorders, which no longer would be located deep inside aircraft. Chris Benich,
a senior Honeywell official, worried about "adding complexity to the airplane,"
as well as maintenance and reliability issues.
Mark Smith, the executive
representing Boeing, said the Chicago plane maker has placed deployable
recorders on various aircraft it builds for the military but has no current
plans for putting them on commercial jetliners. Over the years, according to Mr.
Smith, the devices have provided usable data only in about three-quarters of
crashes, either because they couldn't be located or were damaged in the other
instances. "We think they need study" before widespread adoption, Mr. Smith
said, noting the dangers of unintended or accidental deployment.
DRS
Technologies Inc., a prominent maker of deployable recorders, encourages their
use to supplement traditional black boxes. Blake van den Heuvel, a DRS official,
told the session that his company has put its technology on a total of 4,000
planes and helicopters. Over some 60 million flight hours, the recorders have
worked as designed in every case except on jet fighters, he
said.
Reflecting the sentiments of many airlines and suppliers, Mr. Smith
said Boeing favors more-effective use of technology and capabilities aircraft
already have, rather than mandates for new hardware. With some 69,000 airline
flights daily world-wide, he stressed the dangers of "unintended consequences"
from embracing new devices or procedures.
Steve Kong, business and
development manager for Inmarsat ISAT.LN -0.22% PLC, a London-based satellite
operator, said the company already has offered to provide every-15-minute
location updates free of charge to airlines with compatible systems. Some
airlines can pay to get updates as often as every minute or
less.
Meanwhile, both Boeing and Inmarsat are working on enhanced systems
intended to transmit more extensive data to the ground as often as every 10
seconds if there is an emergency.
Regardless of how regulations evolve,
the panelists agreed that none of the projected satellite-transmission solutions
are likely to entirely replace actual recorders.
Space-based technology
"can get important data off the aircraft, reliably, even as it is going down,"
said Richard Hayden, an executive with FLYHT Aerospace Solutions Ltd. , a
Canadian provider of real-time data from aircraft systems. But even he said such
alternatives won't make black box hardware unnecessary.
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