Regrettably even in the Hypersafety conscious world of Civil Aviation there is a tendency for the good old steady as she goes, conservative let’s not rock the boat character traits of people with turf to protect to work against innovation and constant vigilance in the search for a better way. Just as the People of the State of Victoria in Australia are discovering as they look at the aftermath of their recent tragic fires even a quick look at this disaster shows that there are very doable technological fixes which may have contributed to avoiding this diaster as well as very doable strategies for ensuring the retrieval of the vital black boxes (which are actually red).
Real time satellite surveillance of Airlines en-route with real time satellite derived weather could radically reduce the probability of a weather induced in-flight break up (which seems to be the current favoured theory) and an automatically ejecting and buoyant Black box is quite easily possible now.
Risk will never be absent but lessons should be heeded and what ever actions will reduce the possibility of such a terrible event in the future should be implemented.
June 11th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
why is the Black Box not buoyant and automatically ejected, it seem such so obvious. There must by reasons why it was not done already long ago.
June 14th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I think the need has not been fully appreciated up till now and it would of course be an extra complication and cost. I suspect that they will go to real time data gathering soon as an alternative as the amount of band width to transmit all the data the Black Box is collecting is only relatively small (less than that for a mobile phone converstaion)
Cheers
Michael