Air France black boxes located in Atlantic

They've narrowed it down, but the locater signals have stopped emitting.

I'm surprised however that they don't last longer these days.
 
Antar Bolaeisk said:
I wonder why they can't just have an emergency jettison button that launches a black box away from the plane (there are two aren't there?) when things become dire.

Fair enough the last thing going through a pilots' minds when the ground is hurtling towards them is "oh I must launch the black box" but there's probably some way to automate the procedure, say when velocity limitations, a minimum altitude and extreme g-force requirements are met.
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I would imagine they need the flight recorders to record everything up until the moment of impact to gain an accurate picture of what happened.
 
philtorrens said:
I would imagine they need the flight recorders to record everything up until the moment of impact to gain an accurate picture of what happened.
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If the two black boxes were recording the same information (as opposed to one recording the flight data and another recording the cockpit data) then one could be jettisoned from the plane using some form of balloon cocoon similar to what the Mars rover used and the other could go down with the plane. It wouldn't even need to be jettisoned until the very last moment either as it would only need enough time to clear the plane.
 
Is there any reason why the black boxes can't be automatically "ejected" when it's obvious that the plane is going to crash?

Perhaps have two - one that stays on board and one that ejects?

EDIT: Beaten :(
 
Gaygle said:
Is there any reason why the black boxes can't be automatically "ejected" when it's obvious that the plane is going to crash?
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Cost vs benefit.

Outfitting the entire commercial airliner fleet would be massively expensive.

I couldn't say how often data recorders fail to be recovered after accidents but I suspect it is very low.

Just look at the shelved plans to equip commercial airlines with missile defence systems. Immensely useful if someone points a stinger at your plane but the chances of it actually happening did not justify the cost.
 
Ejected? That's nice, were all gonna die but look at the little black box flying off to freedom.

Should paint a little smiley face on it with two fingers sticking up on the side just to add effect.
 
jonno.co.uk said:
modern planes should record data remotely by satellite
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As far as I know the Airbus A330 did transmit fault codes back to it's base in France by means of an onboard Satelitte system. This is how they knew there was an issue relating to the speed sensors, but they still don't know the full story.
 
jonno.co.uk said:
i'm just saying, in todays age of technology there has to be a better way.
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Yeah, but you're expecting a plane, which in in the process of crashing to maintain its transmission dish trained on a stationery sattellite, to keep the information flowing? Where exactly are you intending on putting the dish anyway? You cant exactly put it externally, that would play hell with the aerodynamics, and internally is going to take up valuable space.
 
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