That’s surprising that the black box overwrites itself after 2 hours of recording. This article linked to an article I missed about how the plane that had the door/panel fall off had the cockpit audio overwritten because it wasn’t collected in time.
The black box isn’t like a modern hard drive, with terabytes of storage. They’re often old, and even the modern ones need to put so much effort into protection against things like fire, seawater and collisions that they don’t have as much space as you might imagine.
They have to rely on someone going out of their way to take the box out, or shut down the plane, because the alternative would be for them to have some way to decide for themselves to stop recording. If they could do that then a false positive would cause them to miss potentially important data, so they’re designed to keep going until someone makes it stop
Regulations. Everything requires so much time/effort to certify and cost. Even as technology has moved forward, they have to recoup their investment in certifying the equipment.
I didn’t say anything like that. The black box is physically much bigger than a modern SSD, but stores far less data because of all the extra problems it has to deal with
Being hit by a truck, then catching fire and being allowed to burn while doused in jet fuel for a while before being dunked in seawater for a few days.
The flight recorder itself doesn’t do that either. Just the case surrounding it. You could just as well put an SSD in it. Hell it would probably be better as older tech was more vulnerable to vibrations.
Of-the-shelf SSDs are optimized for speed and price.
Flight recorders are typically specified to withstand an impact of 3400 g and temperatures of over 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), exposure to salt water, and high pressure if it sinks to the bottom of the sea as required by EUROCAE ED-112.
Maybe you could design a flight recorder that uses SSDs, but then you must get it certified again for the new hardware, which will cost a lot of money nobody wants to spend.
The next step in flight recorders is to also send a live feed of telemetric data back to some ground station so the last position of the plane is known - with a flight recorder you only get this data after you found the wreck. Currently submitting this signal is optional and can be turned of by the pilot, which is the reason why Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing.
There’s a proposal by the FAA (here) to increase the length to 25h for new planes.
There have been catastrophic events that took longer than 2h by themselves to manifest, so they lost the beginning of the disaster by this stupidly short record duration.
That’s surprising that the black box overwrites itself after 2 hours of recording. This article linked to an article I missed about how the plane that had the door/panel fall off had the cockpit audio overwritten because it wasn’t collected in time.
The black box isn’t like a modern hard drive, with terabytes of storage. They’re often old, and even the modern ones need to put so much effort into protection against things like fire, seawater and collisions that they don’t have as much space as you might imagine.
They have to rely on someone going out of their way to take the box out, or shut down the plane, because the alternative would be for them to have some way to decide for themselves to stop recording. If they could do that then a false positive would cause them to miss potentially important data, so they’re designed to keep going until someone makes it stop
That sounds like something they need to improve on then. Two hours is a ridiculously short amount of time given the tech we have in 2024.
It’s not like we don’t have the technology
As of 2008 it is an FAA requirement that the recording duration is a minimum of two hours.
Just designed to (minimum) spec.
Regulations. Everything requires so much time/effort to certify and cost. Even as technology has moved forward, they have to recoup their investment in certifying the equipment.
So the old tech is somehow better and smaller than a modern SSD?
Doubt
I didn’t say anything like that. The black box is physically much bigger than a modern SSD, but stores far less data because of all the extra problems it has to deal with
So what problems would a modern SSD not be better at?
Black box were Solid State Drive before SSD were common, the advantages of no moving parts are simply too high.
Being hit by a truck, then catching fire and being allowed to burn while doused in jet fuel for a while before being dunked in seawater for a few days.
I’ll bet you can’t find an SSD which can do that.
The flight recorder itself doesn’t do that either. Just the case surrounding it. You could just as well put an SSD in it. Hell it would probably be better as older tech was more vulnerable to vibrations.
Of-the-shelf SSDs are optimized for speed and price.
Flight recorders are typically specified to withstand an impact of 3400 g and temperatures of over 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), exposure to salt water, and high pressure if it sinks to the bottom of the sea as required by EUROCAE ED-112.
Maybe you could design a flight recorder that uses SSDs, but then you must get it certified again for the new hardware, which will cost a lot of money nobody wants to spend. The next step in flight recorders is to also send a live feed of telemetric data back to some ground station so the last position of the plane is known - with a flight recorder you only get this data after you found the wreck. Currently submitting this signal is optional and can be turned of by the pilot, which is the reason why Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing.
There’s a proposal by the FAA (here) to increase the length to 25h for new planes.
There have been catastrophic events that took longer than 2h by themselves to manifest, so they lost the beginning of the disaster by this stupidly short record duration.