Today, ELT`s have been in use for about half a century or so. They are connected to the airframe and detach at a certain G-force. While lying on the ground or floating in the sea, they transmit their GPS location on the emergency frequencies, thereby enabling the COSPAS/SARSAT satellites to pinpoint their exact position. This again, may enable SAR units to deploy to the exact area of the accident. Location of the FDR/CVR should then be a piece of cake. I therefore believe investing in a retrofit is superflous, (Ed.)
New Black Boxes Will Be Easier to Track in Plane Crashes at Sea
A new type of flight recorder, which Airbus plans
to install on A350 jetliners due in 2019, is designed to detach from the plane
and float to the surface after a crash at sea.
Since the dawn of the
jet age, flying has gotten significantly safer. In fact, you are thousands of
times more likely to die while driving to the airport than you are flying in a
plane.
Yet for all the safety advances, aviation safety experts have long
been stymied by plane crashes in the sea. The onboard recorders, known as black
boxes, can be difficult, if not impossible, to recover deep beneath the
waves.
But a new generation of recorders, announced this summer by Airbus
and set to roll out on new A350 airframes in late 2019, will make those boxes
easier to retrieve. Instead of going down to the bottom with the plane, a
recorder will be released and float back to the surface. It will then send a
signal that satellites could pick up, allowing searchers to pinpoint its
location.
That could be just the first step in changing how data is
recovered in a plane crash. Some industry advocates suggest that airplanes no
longer carry their flight data at all and instead live-stream it to a central
storage place on the ground. But "that future is taking some time to materialize
all across the fleet," said Charles Champion, executive vice president of
engineering at Airbus Commercial Aircraft. "The drawback to that is we don't
have broadband everywhere," so streaming is not yet reliable enough to make
onboard black boxes obsolete.
No matter how they obtain the information,
investigators say it is important to learn the causes of air crashes. "If you
don't solve the accident or if it remains unclear, it can cast a pall," said
Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety
Board. "The way you do that these days is by looking at the data."
The
redesigned recorders are largely a response to two of aviation's biggest
modern-day disasters. Both highlighted the limitations of the current generation
of black boxes.
In 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic
en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, killing all 228 people on board. After a
multinational, multimillion-dollar search that lasted more than two years, the
flight data and cockpit voice recorders were finally recovered from the ocean
floor.
They revealed that the crash had been caused in part by faulty
pitot (pronounced PEE-toe) tubes - sensors that provide airspeed data to the
pilots. The tubes had gotten clogged with ice, resulting in some inaccurate data
in the cockpit. Confused by mixed signals from their instruments, the pilots
unintentionally put their aircraft into an aerodynamic stall, which ultimately
caused the crash.
In the wake of that time-consuming and expensive
recovery effort, many in the aviation industry and regulators began calling for
flight data to be made more easily recoverable after a crash. That effort gained
traction in 2014 after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared. Based on radar
data, experts believe it probably veered off course and crashed into the Indian
Ocean while flying between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Beijing.
Most of
the wreckage, including the data and voice recorders, was never recovered, so
the precise cause of the route deviation has not officially been determined.
There were 239 people on board.
When a plane crashes into water, a sonic
beacon on the recorders sends out a signal for about 30 days. In theory, the
beacon makes them discoverable with the right sonar equipment, but that is not
necessarily the case in deep water, especially if investigators do not already
know the precise location of the wreckage.
Airbus's new generation of
recorders, which is still being developed by L3 Technologies and the Canadian
subsidiary of Leonardo DRS, will combine voice and data functions into one
apparatus. Aircraft will carry both a fixed and deployable version, each storing
25 hours of cockpit voice - up from about two hours now - and data on thousands
of flight parameters.
In the event of a crash, the deployable recorder
will be released from the plane, "triggered either by structural deformation in
the fuselage or because it starts to go under water," Mr. Champion, of Airbus,
said. "Under a few meters, it will release, and the box pops up back to the
surface."
Once the box is separated from the fuselage, a satellite-based
detection system will be activated - the first of its kind on a civilian
aircraft. "The first alert will go off within three seconds after the beacon is
deployed," said Blake van den Heuvel, director of air programs at DRS
Technologies Canada. "With that first hit, they'll be able to pinpoint the
location of the downed aircraft."
Unlike traditional sonic locaters, the
satellite-based technology instantly provides the recorder's exact position,
updating regularly as it bobs on the water. DRS is designing that satellite
locator to last 150 hours - about six days. The traditional beacon on the fixed
recorder, in the aircraft, will be upgraded to transmit for 90 days in response
to regulations that go into effect in 2018.
Mr. van den Heuvel said that
his company had been supplying similar deployable recorders on military aircraft
for decades and that they had a proven record of recoverability.
"For the
ones that don't get recovered, I think you'll find that we have situations where
we've had a midair collision of two tactical aircraft, two very, very small
aircraft both approaching Mach 1, and in that event you have very little left of
the aircraft," he said. "For transport aircraft, we've had a 100 percent success
rate."
Although Boeing has not made any similar announcements about
efforts to make data on its aircraft easier to recover, the company emphasized
that it placed a high value on safety.
"The culture of safety has really
progressed collectively over the years," said Elizabeth A. Pasztor, Boeing's
vice president for safety, security and compliance.
The industry is much
more likely than it once was to share data, Ms. Pasztor said. "When it comes to
safety, we truly do collaborate as an industry," she said. "This is not an area
to compete."
In the past, with less technology and fewer regulations,
flying was a much riskier way to travel. Archival pages from The New York Times
can attest that not so long ago, pilots were more likely to misjudge terrain and
crash into mountains, or even to crash into other planes in midair.
The
last fatal airliner crash in the United States occurred in 2013 when an Asiana
Airlines flight came in too low as it approached the runway in San Francisco and
struck the sea wall at its edge. Video shows the plane pirouetting dramatically
across the runway, but despite the remarkable images, only three people died;
one of them survived the crash only to be run over by a rescue vehicle racing to
the scene. The passengers who were killed were not wearing their seatbelts and
were ejected from the plane.
In 2009, 50 people died when a Colgan Air
commuter flight from Newark to Buffalo stalled approaching the runway,
essentially falling out of the sky. That accident led to a series of new
regulations based on recommendations of the National Transportation Safety Board
on flight crew training and working conditions.
Robert L. Sumwalt, the
chairman of the N.T.S.B., emphasized that making flying safer was a shared
effort across the industry. It has largely been successful, he said, but is
continuing.
"When you put all of this together - the human, the machine,
the environment, including the things the aircraft manufacturers are doing -
those things combine to make our aviation system much more safe than it was a
few decades ago," Mr. Sumwalt said.
