Air crash investigations.

[xelasnave]

Why is the focus on what went wrong.
We all know something will go wrong so people will die.
Why no parachutes for example.
No doubt it costs too much and well deaths can be written off as small stats which show chance of death is not a worry.
Great.
Why do we have life boats in ships but nothing on a plane.
Well we accept what we are told.
I say that it is not good enough.
Can we build planes where the "passenger pod" is jetstioned and floats to the ground will all lives preserved.
Engineers love a challenge but accountants do not.
I think it is strange the public happily will accept a ship with no life boats.
Now tell me why or why not.forgive my phone making up words ask if it is unreadable.
Alex

[The_bluester (Paul)]

I think they would be up against it to make a practicable "Pod" to eject the passengers of a modern aircraft.

I think the focus on what went wrong is the right way to approach most air crashes, so many earlier crashes were a concatenation of individual failings that are hard to put together that without the focus on "Why" they could easily happen again and again if the real cause is not uncovered.

Post crash investigation is what uncovered the fact that a surprisingly small amount of winter slush on a runway will brake a plane sufficiently to prevent it from taking off. In the link below, the pilot was blamed for this crash for around a decade before it was established and accepted that slush on the runway was the cause. Without that investigation, the official cause would have remained that the pilot did not de ice the wings and the road to a carbon copy crash would have remained.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_air_disaster

[AndrewJ]

What i want to know is why, in this day and age, isn't all aircraft telemetry and data logging that currently goes into the black boxes, streamed live to ground facilities. ( We know Rolls Royce does it for its engines?? )
It would be easy enough to encrypt it for each airline to keep some stuff confidential as required, but there would be none of this "gotta find the black boxes" before you can do anything.

Andrew

[OICURMT]

Originally Posted by AndrewJ

What i want to know is why, in this day and age, isn't all aircraft telemetry and data logging that currently goes into the black boxes, streamed live to ground facilities. ( We know Rolls Royce does it for its engines?? )
It would be easy enough to encrypt it for each airline to keep some stuff confidential as required, but there would be none of this "gotta find the black boxes" before you can do anything.

Andrew

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/why-we-...ight-tracking/

[raymo]

Hi Alex, The subject of escape from aircraft has been extensively
researched, and now there are "whole of aircraft" parachutes fitted to some
light aircraft, and one was successfully deployed recently saving all aboard.
Jetliners are a different ball game altogether. Personal chutes would be
totally impractical for several reasons. Imagine the chaos of hundreds of
people trying to don chutes within the confines of the aisles between the seats. Not to mention the people that would be panic stricken. Even if you could get out you wouldn't survive the cold and lack of oxygen at say
11,000 metres or more. Jumping out into a slipstream of say 850kph
would be catastrophic. This all means that for chutes to be deployable the
pilot must be able to come to a much lower altitude, and a much lower speed. In many/most emergencies this option would not be available to the pilot. You can also discount all the events where the plane blows up, or disintegrates from structural failure. A stricken plane frequently falls with a tumbling motion, which would throw the people around inside, making it impossible to use a chute.In many cases any survivors would land in the middle of the ocean, and wait in terror to be eaten by an ooh nasty of some sort, or in the middle of a desert, or mountain range, or a
jungle, and die of exposure. If there were a lot of survivors they would be spread over large distances, making the job of rescuers far more difficult.
Some of the above also applies to passenger/crew pods. They have been
experimented with, and the first thing is that you have to be able to slow the plane down to a speed that will not cause the chute[s] to be shredded
immediately upon deployment, the structure has to be considerably
strengthened at all the anchor points, the chute[s] would be huge, and need
a very large amount of storage space, and the chute[s] and the
mechanism needed to deploy them would be very heavy, making a
commercial installation economically unviable. Again, only in a reasonably
controllable situation could they be deployed; useless if the plane is tumbling out of the sky. A final note-- some of the people with individual chutes would die through being too shocked to activate their chute after jumping, and others through simply having never used one before, and
doing something wrong.
This was written as I went along, so I probably have things out of a
logical order.
raymo

[AndrewJ]

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/why-we-...ight-tracking/

Lots of reasons given for why not, but in the past, one crash would instigate major changes, irrespective of cost.
ie TCas etc was brought in even tho very few planes ever had mid air collisions.
Saying it works well now isnt a help when you cant find the black box ( like MH370 ) Reports today quote we have spent nearly 100million so far.
Maybe to reduce costs we can use reverse logic and remove black boxes and all their extra cost, as not many planes crash these days.

Andrew

[AussieTrooper (Ben)]

Black boxes are also useful in near misses. When you analyse and prevent the near misses, the 'hits' tend to go away too.

[AndrewJ]

Gday Ben

When you analyse and prevent the near misses, the 'hits' tend to go away too.

Fully agree, hence why i cant understand the resistance to getting live streaming going ( even if with limited data ( like position ) to begin with )

Andrew

[xelasnave]

I am not going to accept any of these excuses I just want the problem fixed and hang the cost.
Pods would work.
Its ok to developed F1 racing money no problem.
I object to this attitude that it is too hard or too expensive.
I wonder how they do it on other planets.
Alex

[raymo]

There is also the matter of accepting risks as we go through life. You
have a far far higher chance of dying in a road crash, or a number of other ways. There is also the fact that the most dangerous times in any flight are take off and landing, when chutes[or pods] would be useless.
raymo

[deanm (Dean)]

Have to agree with raymo: we don't ban busses, trains, ships, motorbikes & passenger vehicles because people who get killed on them could have been saved with ejection seats or pods.
People get run-over walking down the street: should everyone don their 'Personal Pavement Ejection Rocket Back-pack + Parachute' before going down to the shops??!
Dean

[xelasnave]

Well we just need to eliminate take offs and landings.
Alex

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by deanm

Have to agree with raymo: we don't ban busses, trains, ships, motorbikes & passenger vehicles because people who get killed on them could have been saved with ejection seats or pods.
People get run-over walking down the street: should everyone don their 'Personal Pavement Ejection Rocket Back-pack + Parachute' before going down to the shops??!
Dean

Yes.
Now we are getting somewhere.
Alex

[deanm (Dean)]

I'd agree with Alex if he paid that kind of dough for me!
Dean

[Exfso (Peter)]

The mind boggles.....

[OICURMT]

Originally Posted by AndrewJ

Reports today quote we have spent nearly 100million so far.
Maybe to reduce costs we can use reverse logic and remove black boxes and all their extra cost, as not many planes crash these days.

Andrew

$100million is a drop in a bucket for any major industry.

Reducing the costs by elimiation of blackboxes is also insignificant. The black boxes are there to determine what happened, not how to prevent an accident. So having them has huge potential to save money in the future by understanding what happened in the past.

End of the day, it's ALWAYS about money. Cost v. Benefit analysis... the blackbox saves money by deferring or eliminating future accidents and the consequential litigation.

There was no real reason to search for MH370 save the benefits of a government appearing to do as much as possible on behalff of their citizens. Why do I state this? Because I believe the plane was hijacked by one of the crew, therefore we know the reason.

[el_draco (Rom)]

Originally Posted by Kunama

The problem is that we, the passengers, demand such low ticket prices and are therefore pushing the airlines to cut costs to remain competitive. Eventually maintenance is moved offshore to wherever labour is cheap, uncertified parts are plentiful and equipment failures result.

Perhaps the budget conscious ought to have to sign a waiver accepting the risk associated their lower fares.....

Which is why my blood coagulates at the very thought of going in one of those bloody things .

I don't think I have watched to many Air crash investigations docos but...

The thought of my carcass being recovered using a straw is just a bit much...

That's if they can find any of it...

Or contemplating traveling at some obscene velocity in a pressurised tin foil can that suffers a structural failure at 12,000m... and the ensuing effects on said carcass don't really bear mentioning...

Or being on board one that catches fire at a similar horrifying altitude and becoming a human blow torch as the wreckage plummets for an eternity to the earth below. Now THAT'S is disturbing...

Or perhaps having some misguided religious type making a statement in the seat across from me, at any altitude...

Or my legitimate concern for burning tons of fuel and pushing us closer to the magic 500ppm in which we all FRY

I'll take the frigging boat... but...

Oh GAWD!!!!! SHARKS... !!!!

[AndrewJ]

the blackbox saves money by deferring or eliminating future accidents and the consequential litigation.

We are in furious agreement there. I just recon its time to improve on it.
My internet started with dialup at woeful data rates, and over time, technology has improved on that.
Making live streaming from planes should be "relatively" cheap now, given its basically just a comms system to an external backup. ( And yes i know its not that simple, but close )
Maybe in congested areas, planes transmit data to nearby planes in a peer to peer mode, and satellite bandwidth is only required for the few planes out of range.
Gotta be some smart ways out there to at least track a plane without having to negotiate with countries that are allegedly withholding info that might give away their radar capabilities etc ( another theory that would cost a lot if proven )

Andrew

[xelasnave]

Matt where did you get your numbers?
I wonder how much it would cost?
If it doubled the price of each plane that would not double the price of a ticket.
So I wonder what the cost may be.
USA spends 100 billion on research for new weapons which of course is about killing.
Would 20% of that cover designing a pod approach?
I can not see that it would be difficult..neck ee can do space trips etc.
Why is it that saving lives as I envisage such a problem.
Its only money and there is plenty of money.
How much are lives worth ..funny we could work that out because we could cost the pod idea find out how it would drive up prices and draw numbers from that.
But already I would day prices would not double.
Anyone like to work it out ...are we bored enough.
I am I just checked the tv so I am up for it.

Alex

[xelasnave]

I know the food problem wont go away so I propose eliminating various species.
Now there are a lot of whales that eat so much krill we need to delete them and also the ones that eat fish humans can eat.
That krill could support many humans. And all those fish eating birds must go... the humans wecould feed by redirecting fish that sea birds consume.

Well we need to think of saving and feeding humans so if we cant eat it or it eats something we eat get rid of that species.
Which brings me back to pods for planes which I submit must be a goal for humanity as the example set by air carriers will transfer into safer cars and pavements for all. In fact there are a lot of plants that we cant eat or use they need to go as well.
Simple really.
Alex