Your opinion.

[FireAngelZero]

As most of you may have seen over the last month (unless you live under a rock in which case you will hear about it now), the recent revelations of MH370 have prompted more questions than answers, well a lot more questions and barely any answers. So like always every time an incident occurs it prompts the aviation industry to change it's procedures all across the board. So what would you like to see changed in aviation? What do you think should be done? I mean I'm no CNN aviation columnist, I'm just seeing what your opinions are. Vent, comment, whatever you want to say, say it here.

[eugenevh]

It might sound like I am beating a dead horse. But my vote (if I had to have one) goes for this:

Taken from Wikipedia:

Proposed requirements

In the United States, the "Safe Aviation Flight Enhancement (SAFE) Act of 2003" was introduced on June 26, 2003 by Congressman David Price (NC) and Congressman John Duncan (Tennessee) as a bipartisan effort to ensure investigators have access to information immediately following commercial accidents.^[27] On July 19, 2005, a revised SAFE Act was introduced and referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure of the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill was referred to the House Subcommittee on Aviation during the 108th, 109th, and 110th congresses.^[28][29][30] On March 12, 2014 in response to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Congressman David Price re-introduced the concept in the House of Representatives.^[31] The SAFE Act calls for implementing the NTSB 1999 recommendations. Under the NTSB's recommendations, operators would be required to install two sets of combination Cockpit Voice and Data Recorder (CVDR) systems (or "Black Boxes"). The SAFE Act calls for making the second CVDR set "deployable or ejectable". The "deployable" recorder combines the cockpit voice/flight data recorders and an emergency locator transmitter (ELT) in a single unit. The "deployable" unit would depart the aircraft milliseconds before impact, activated by sensors. The unit is designed to "eject" and "fly" away from the crash site, to survive the terminal velocity of fall, to float on water indefinitely, and would be equipped with satellite technology for immediate location of crash impact site. The "deployable" CVDR technology has been used by the U.S. Navy since 1993.^[32] The recommendations would involve a massive retrofit program. However, government funding would negate cost objections from manufacturers and airlines. Operators would get both sets of recorders for free: they would not have to pay for the one set they are currently required by law to carry. The cost of the second "deployable/ejectable CVDR" (or "Black Box") was estimated at $30 million for installation in 500 new aircraft (about $60,000 per new commercial plane). The SAFE ACT legislation failed to pass in 2003 (H.R. 2632) or in 2005 (H.R. 3336) or in 2007 (H.R. 4336).^[33]

[JAL1628]

That's intriguing.

[JAL1628]

I guess I'm surprised cockpit conversations aren't being recorded in real time at a central repository, just like telephone calls are. You can subpoena actual telephone conversations for court proceedings can't you? Or maybe I'm wrong about that one..

Anyway, one (1) other point of contention.. why do the batteries of these black boxed only last 30 days?? I thought battery technology had come a long way.

[eugenevh]

Recording each and every conversation in each and every commercial aircraft would take a huge amount of bandwidth via mostly Satellite (especially for long distance over water flights). This would be a prohibitive cost.

And when you talk about a central repository then you would have a problem where most countries would indeed have a problem with having their airlines' cockpit recordings stored in another country (especially when you don't want your particular operational procedures or information about VIP passengers etc. being known. Do you think China would want the conversations of their carriers stored in American databases? Do you think American based airlines would want their cockpit recordings stored in a database in China? Ok. You can have each country responsible for storing their own aircraft's recordings, but that comes back to each airline/country would have to invest huge amounts of money to create the data centres to store all the conversations. The setting up the legal entities to manage and secure that information. How do you secure that and what legal processes would be allowed to access those? Another huge cost to add for maybe a once in 20 years event?

As to telephone conversations:
Except for the NSA which might have recorded each and every conversation going over American controlled IT links, I don't think that each and every conversation is stored. Most likely the telephone companies would store the numbers dialed, so connections between devices could be traced, but not what was said. (Incidentally there is a good talk on TED which is as insightful as scary.

http://www.ted.com/talks/malte_spitz_your_phone_company_is_watching

For recording of conversations you would require a court order for a wiretap in most democratic countries. So making it compulsory for airlines would come up against invasion of privacy for airline pilots. Having cockpit voice recorded for accident investigation after the fact is much different than just having your normal day to day working conversations recorded. Pilots have rights to privacy too.

As to the battery issue, I think they should have more batteries in black boxes to have the signal broadcast for longer as the 30 days is clearly not enough. When SA295 went down in 1987 the pingers ALSO died after 30 days and were NO help in finding the wreckage. Only a careful grid search later by Eastport International located the wreckage by sonar mapping of the ocean floor. Further, with SA295 they knew that the aircraft went down on it's way to Mauritius. They just looked in the wrong place initially - The Indian ocean is HUGE!. With MH370 they don't even know where it did go down at all.

[fleetlordatvar]

tech has reached it max & a longer time would require a bigger battery & redesign of the black box. The main reason we get an impression batteries last longer is because PC programers actually write programs to tax the battery the least possible to max out it's life span per charge.