We live in a world where driver-less cars are being tested, robots are getting smarter and we can even take photos of Mars, a planet millions of kilometers away, and download it onto our devices with a tap of our finger. Yet, when a plane crashes, we have to comb through great portions of the ocean floor at extensive costs just to get one step closer to finding out what went wrong on-board.
Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, carrying 239 people, disappeared over two years ago on 8 March 2014. As of September 2016, 110,000 square kilometers of seafloor has been searched, $160 million has been spent and the black boxes have yet to be found. The cause of the crash remains a mystery and grief-stricken family members have no closure.
Black boxes, invented in the 1950s, have not been transformed much since then. It is an electronic recording device used in aircrafts. It consists of the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, which holds two hours of voice recordings. It can withstand quite extreme conditions as it is encased with aluminium. The only way to track a missing black box is through the sonic ‘pings’ it sends out, which it can do for 30 days once lost. The data collected lies purely within the black box – it is not backed up to another location.
This device seems pretty archaic to me. We are living in the era of big-data and cloud-storage. We have satellites and cell towers that deliver all sorts of data to us. We are offered in-flight Wi-Fi and live TV when we travel. Yet, we allow critical flight data to go down with the plane?
Why have we not used cloud technology to our advantage in this situation? It could change the entire way we investigate aircraft accidents. It could cut the amount of time required for investigations, the costs involved and it will help us to identify what went wrong at a more rapid pace and prevent similar accidents from happening much faster.
I understand the technical constraints and economic-based resistance towards implementing a cloud-storage system for flight data, as it involves high costs. I also understand that pilots may not want to have their conversations in the cockpit streamed and stored. I’m aware that plane crashes, such as the crash of MH370, do not occur often. However, is it acceptable to lose an aircraft as large as the Boeing 777, carrying that many people, for over two years, in this day and age? How can we innovate to find a solution to this problem?
Sources:
Bachman, J 2014, ‘Why Do Airlines Keep ‘Black Box’ Flight Data Trapped on Plane’, Bloomberg, 10 March. Available from: <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-10/malaysia-air-crash-why-do-airlines-keep-black-box-flight-data-trapped-on-planes>. [9 Oct 2016].
Lecher, C 2014, ‘Why We Haven’t Built A Better Black Box’, Popular Science, 1 April. Available from: <http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/why-we-havent-built-better-black-box>. [9 Oct 2016].
‘MH370: Officials Say Piece of Aircraft Wing Found on Mauritius is From Missing Plane’ 2016, The Guardian, 7 October. Available from: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/07/mh370-officials-say-piece-of-aircraft-wing-found-on-mauritius-is-from-missing-plane>. [9 Oct 2016].
Shalal, A 2014, ‘Search for Missing Plane Spurs Call to Upload Black Box Data to The Cloud’, Business Insider, 19 March. Available from: <http://www.businessinsider.com/black-box-cloud-data-2014-3?international=true&r=US&IR=T>. [9 Oct 2016].
