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We've all seen it before. A flight goes down in the ocean and
there's a search for the wreckage. Unfortunately, because of
the way planes are built, everything splinters and shatters,
and either sinks to the bottom, or remains floating but drifts
off way before any search party arrives. This
idea is for a
simple tethered device to deploy upon inundation of a piece
of the plane. Let's put it into the tail of th wing. Once the
tail detects that it is indeed sinking, a small charge is set off,
releasing a bouy and a long, thin line (4 miles?) that allows it
to mark exactly where the plane hit the water. Days of
expensive searching and tension could be avoided if they
knew exactly where to dive to find the wreckage.
Distress radiobeacon
http://en.wikipedia...istress_radiobeacon
Wikipedia on current technology. [baconbrain, Sep 21 2010]
[link]
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I worked on some prototypes for some similar oceanagraphic tech thingys back in the the 80's. Engineering challenges abound. |
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Sounds like a good idea to me. |
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But also, is there no transponder which will give a signal
when underwater, which is detectable from the surface?
Maybe even a simple sonar thing that goes ping ping ping,
loudly enough to be detectable by a hydrophone from a few
tens of miles away? |
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The idea is that the beacon is buoyant, but tethered to airframe by a line. |
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Contrary to popular belief, the flight recording
devices are often damaged beyond use so they
don't tell crash investigators what happened. |
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Take TWA 800, for instance. The recorders got
everything that happened up to about 15,000 ft
then stopped recording when a catastrophic
explosion in an inner starboard wing tank took
everything apart. The recorder boxes were ripped
open and inundated, damaging the data already
recorded though they were easy to recover, being
in only 100ft of water. |
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Making them buoyant implies less robust
construction and therefore even less value to
investigators, I fear. |
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why not make multiple blackboxes? Making 10 less
robust blackboxes might be cheaper and more
reliable than 1 really robust one. |
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wot about flying boats then ? |
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Actually, port and starboard are widely used in reference to
planes. The exception (I believe) is the navy, whose planes
have "left" and "right", to avoid confusion with the "port" and
"starboard" of the aircraft carrier. |
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By an interesting coincidence, I recently visted the bridge of
an aircraft carrier,and was informed that the terms "right"
and "left" are used, there. |
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Shirly modern tech can make black boxes pretty
cheap and tough? I mean, to record all the data on
the aircraft you'll need.... oooh, a truncated
RaspberryPi and a 32gig micro SD card? Thick rubber
box, hide 1 under each seat if you like... |
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...and run a huge cable trunk to it. |
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Alternatively, the first hacker on board might use
the system to fly to Disneyland. Where there's a
connection... |
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// But also, is there no transponder which will give a signal when
underwater, which is detectable from the surface? Maybe even a simple
sonar thing that goes ping ping ping, loudly enough to be detectable by
a hydrophone from a few tens of miles away? // |
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The "black boxes" that are actually orange have those. I think Big Clive
has a video of disassembling one. Maybe somebody else. |
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// Making them buoyant implies less robust construction and therefore
even less value to investigators, I fear. // |
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If you take the current ones and wrap them in foam, won't that both
float them and cushion them? They'll be bigger, though. |
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My variation: Inside the vertical stabilizer (which, on most large planes,
is disproportionate-lookingly large), mount a cannon, pointing diagonally
upward and backward. It can be much lighter than a regular cannon,
because it only needs to fire once. Upon an (imminent or presently
occurring) impact detected by whatever sensor at the plane's nose, it
fires a beacon that deploys a parachute at the top of its trajectory. (If
the impact is occurring presently with a vertical wall, and the cannon is
aimed more upward than backward, the beacon should be launched with
as little speed as possible and the parachute should be deployed
immediately, I guess.) |
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// It can be much lighter than a regular cannon, because it only needs to fire once. // |
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Hmmm, someone has been studying the Little Boy design specs ... |
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Why a cannon ? For a single-use device, a rocket has many advantages. The launcher is much lighter, the propellant's slightly less hazardous, and it's a very reliable and well-proven technology. A two-stage rocket can make a low-speed launch to clear the empennage - even using cold high-pressure inert gas - and then the second stage (in the same physical casing) can drive it clear. |
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The real solution to this is to enhance ACARS (or build a similar system) so that all flight data are stored remotely. |
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A rocket might be too slow to get away, if the crash is
presently occurring. I wanted to get the beacon out of the
way of the ground/ocean/cliff ASAP. |
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Aren't there a few satellites that collect the ADS-B signals
now? And somebody on Hackaday.io was designing a system
of small robotic boats for the same purpose a few years ago. |
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