Article

2009-06-06 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-

Bodies Found From Tragic Air France Flight

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Posted by Sherry 2009-06-06 13:33|| || Front Page|| [2 views ] Top

#1 if they have shrapnel with chemical traces, perhaps, but they likely hit at terrific velocity and have been in the water some time.....

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2009-06-06 13:40|| 2009-06-06 13:40|| Front Page Top

#2 Well, that proves me wrong (Thank God) and we don't need to look for another 9-11 right away.

Posted by Redneck Jim 2009-06-06 14:38|| 2009-06-06 14:38|| Front Page Top

#3 An EU based commenter had this to say:
Here's a thought I had that you might be interested in regarding that flight and what is likely to be the elusive black box flight recorder.

Engineering in the aircraft industry tends to, necessarily, focus on producing highly robust solutions. Hence the standard black box mechanism has one unit that is designed to be as resilient as possible.

Another solution that might not occur to people in that environment would be to replicate the data many many times to many data recorders with the hope that at least one of them will survive and be found.

Modern airlines all have fairly powerful in-flight entertainment systems in the seat-backs. Seats are probably one of the parts of a plane most likely to become detached and to float. So why not replicate the black box data to every single seat-back in flight entertainment unit ? The amounts of data are pretty trivial compared to the multi-media that it has to cope with, perhaps 50MB/hour or something like that even including the voice recording. Most of the infrastructure is there already so it would largely be software changes.

Going forward, it would then make sense to design the unit to be as likely to survive / float as feasible. Make it light (a good thing anyway). Use flash memory perhaps encapsulated in epoxy or something like that to make it resilient. Perhaps make the part of the seat containing the system such that under crash conditions it will break from the metal structure which might otherwise drag it down. Maybe a water-proof membrane around the foam inside to stop water ingress and keep it buoyant.

Seems that the basic are pretty much there anyway.

Posted by 3dc 2009-06-06 16:43|| 2009-06-06 16:43|| Front Page Top

#4 pretty easy to do, 3dc. Good catch

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2009-06-06 16:47|| 2009-06-06 16:47|| Front Page Top

#5 Airbus A330 has history of airspeed problems

Posted by Oztralian 2009-06-06 20:12|| 2009-06-06 20:12|| Front Page Top

#6 Plane seats, wing floating in Atlantic

Posted by Oztralian 2009-06-06 20:17|| 2009-06-06 20:17|| Front Page Top

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