Black Boxes

Couldn't decide if this belongs here or under the Off Topic forum...feel free to move.

Anyway, I was driving home last night and 4 warning lights suddenly illuminated on my dashboard. The LDP, Skid, Brake and Traction Control lights. Drat. I slowed down and a few miles later when I pulled off the highway I stopped the engine and restarted. The lights didn't come back on. I'm going to take it in to the dealers later today, but I was wondering if the car keeps a log of fault lights that display, much like a black box on a plane. (I hate going to dealers with intermittent problems and getting the report back from them 'Customer states....couldn't replicate).

My thought process went off on a tangent, as it tends to fairly frequently lol, and I was thinking about aircraft black boxes, and how in this day and age, how ludicrous they are. The black boxes on the Air France Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic last year were never found, and probably never will be. The cause of the crash remains unknown, but a number of faults were transmitted wirelessly (to either AF or Airbus HQ) immediately before the plane crashed. Those are the only clues they have to work from. If it's possible to transmit that data wirelessly, and if it is possible for airlines to put wifi in planes, obviously the technology is there to transmit large amounts of data between plane and the ground, while in flight.

Why don't Airbus and Boeing install a system so that all the flight parameters (and more) that are currently captured by the black boxes are constantly relayed to the ground, where they can be stored for x amount of time. If a plane is involved in an accident, then all the pertinent data would be available immediately to crash investigators, with no need for them to have to carry out expensive/near on impossible searches. Also, a step up from the cockpit voice recorder, there could be a camera in the cockpit (in addition to the cam on the tails of several newer planes) which could send a feed to the ground. There would be privacy issues maybe with this, pilots might not like being constantly recorded, but it could be set up so that these recordings are only accessed in the event of an accident.

Just a couple of thoughts, I'm sure the guys at Boeing and Airbus must have thought of something similar, just I've never heard of anything being proposed.

Now time to go and persuade the dealer I wasn't imagining it and my car really was crying out for help!

I guess it would very much depend upon the car. I do know that BMW faults are held in the electronics and come up when the car is plugged into diagnostics.

The problem with black box data being transmitted is bandwidth. Some data is sent but it is limited both in packet size and in frequency of report. The actual black box data consists of many channels and quite frequent records.
To get an idea of what a fairly basic black box records see here.

To have reliable oceanic transmission would require constant satellite communications - now multiply that by the number of aircraft - and consider how a constant link could be kept in severe turbulence .....

It has been suggested many times on PPrune.org and answered many times. Almost certainly it will be somewhere in the AF447 threads:
here or here.
Just checked - first occurs on page 2 of the above!

Camera - even greater bandwidth!
You will also be able to find pilot's reactions by searching PPRuNe.

Edit to add:
For the really geeky - the 230 pages about AF447 in Tech Log may be interesting.

This (abridged) post clearly shows the need for high data rates:
Depending upon the data frame programming, up to 40,000 parameters are available on later types but realistically, 2000 - 3000 parameters can be done in a FOQA (Flight Operational Quality Assurance) Program. DFDRs (Digital Flight Data Recorders) typically capture 300 - 1000 parameters at varying sample rates. QARs(Quick Access Recorders), (optical disc, PCMCIA card etc) will almost always have higher sampling rates than DFDRs which for some parameters, ('g', control stick position etc) increases the usefulness - just like a strobe-light going off at 10/second is more useful in a dark room than once every 4 seconds...QED.

An aircraft in trouble is likely to be performing extreme manoeuvres; imagine the difficulty in keeping a highly directional aerial trained upon a satellite to transmit any datastream.

quote:Originally posted by aft1981
Couldn't decide if this belongs here or under the Off Topic forum...feel free to move.

Anyway, I was driving home last night and 4 warning lights suddenly illuminated on my dashboard. The LDP, Skid, Brake and Traction Control lights. Drat. I slowed down and a few miles later when I pulled off the highway I stopped the engine and restarted. The lights didn't come back on. I'm going to take it in to the dealers later today, but I was wondering if the car keeps a log of fault lights that display, much like a black box on a plane. (I hate going to dealers with intermittent problems and getting the report back from them 'Customer states....couldn't replicate).



Yup, anything reasonably new (within the last 6 or 7 years or so) will record all faults which are downloadable by the dealership.

David

[fozzyo]

At an event with Virgin Atlantic I was talking to a few of their guys about data transfers etc between the plane and ground. Specifically relating to Internet access and what is needed - the problem generally comes down to aerials.

How to get the signal from the plane to the satellite and back to the ground or from the plane to the ground. I can't remember what it is but the data rates that are currently available on Virgin aircraft are tiny, not like a Mini, I mean really really tiny, like a Matchbox Model of a Mini tiny. And the problem is that to increase that bandwidth / data rate requires bigger more complicated and heavier aerials. Its a cost of design / implementation and also a running cost with fuel.

The other problem is also security - encryption of said data and access to it.

I have had this exact same thought, in these days of wireless communication why keep it on the plane. I'm sure it will happen one day, but there are lots of changes that need to be made. Maybe on aircraft after the A380 and Dreamliner they will start to do something as standard.

Mat

They've had them for years

Well that didn;t quite work!

http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/slovakia/834/awac.jpg

Interesting reading, thanks Bill. I knew if I had been the only one to think of something along these lines I was in the wrong profession!

Regarding my car, they had some codes to work with, but I'm not sure they needed them. Apparently it was begging for some brake fluid, and cos it didn't have very much at all it disabled all the other systems which use the brakes in order to conserve what it did have. Or so they told me!