>>>>this may be a stupid question, but what's the purpose of the black box anyway??

we have high speed internet access, can't all the telemetry, etc. from an airplane be stored in a cloud? the idea of a black box on the airplane containing all the relevant data seems..well...'quaint'.

it doesnt make sense to me this black box is the best way to keep all this data when you got a $30 million dollar airplane, how much could it cost to store the data remotely instead of buried in a box?<<<<<

There was some woman on Fox who is a former NTSB official that said the same thing.

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Posted by Ace Midnight

Between sanity and madness

Member since Dec 2006

90877 posts

Posted on 3/20/14 at 9:52 am to doublecutter

quote:
a $30 million dollar airplane

That's adorable. I bet the engines on a 777 cost $30 million.

Unit cost on the 777-200ER (which MH370 was) - the "budget" 777 - is $261.5 million.

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Posted by PJinAtl

Atlanta

Member since Nov 2007

12975 posts

Posted on 3/20/14 at 10:23 am to doublecutter

quote:
we have high speed internet access, can't all the telemetry, etc. from an airplane be stored in a cloud? the idea of a black box on the airplane containing all the relevant data seems..well...'quaint'. it doesnt make sense to me this black box is the best way to keep all this data when you got a $30 million dollar airplane, how much could it cost to store the data remotely instead of buried in a box?

On long haul flights, how would you communicate the data? Via satellite?

Think about a flight non-stop from LA to Tokyo. That plane will be out over the open pacific for a long time, only way to get the info into the cloud would be through a satellite data feed.

How many satellites would you need to put up in order to cover every flight path in the world, as well as have enough bandwidth for every plane in the air?

What happens if a couple get hit by micrometeors and are taken out. You have a coverage gap.

Much easier to keep the data in a solid state form where it is recorded so there is the best possible chance of having all of the data you need.

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Posted by MountainTiger

The foot of Mt. Belzoni

Member since Dec 2008

14691 posts

Posted on 3/20/14 at 10:24 am to doublecutter

quote:
we have high speed internet access, can't all the telemetry, etc. from an airplane be stored in a cloud? the idea of a black box on the airplane containing all the relevant data seems..well...'quaint'. it doesnt make sense to me this black box is the best way to keep all this data when you got a $30 million dollar airplane, how much could it cost to store the data remotely instead of buried in a box?<<<<< There was some woman on Fox who is a former NTSB official that said the same thing.

I'd think if feasible you'd want to do both. First of all if you consider how many planes are in the air at any one point in time, that's a metric shite ton of data. So you'd have to have to have adequate bandwidth in the satellites to handle it all. Second, if the satellites are in geostationary orbits, there may be gaps in coverage near the poles. Also, what about communications loss? If there were a solar flare at just the right time, everybody would be asking "Why do we use satellites for this? Why not put a box right in the plane to record the data?"

This post was edited on 3/20/14 at 10:29 am

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