An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear

Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by marcosdumay on Monday January 05, 2015 @12:46PM (#8840010)

Notice that avoiding that the plane disappears does not save any life. That's why people do not care so much about it, and that's why they stil disappear.

That said, good telemetry brings economical gains. Planes will stop disappearing in due time, just not by state decree, and probably because of more usfull devices than this one.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by ceejayoz on Monday January 05, 2015 @02:42PM (#8840654)

> Notice that avoiding that the plane disappears does not save any life.

Analyzing the causes of plane crashes saves lots of lives. You can't do that with a disappeared plane.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by toomuchtodo on Monday January 05, 2015 @02:55PM (#8840734)

You usually get the black box upon recovery, which doesn't save the passengers, but does get you all the valuable data.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by ceejayoz on Monday January 05, 2015 @05:10PM (#8841557)

> You usually get the black box upon recovery, which doesn't save the passengers, but does get you all the valuable data.

And recovery is only possible if you can find the wreckage. MH370 is still missing, and as such the cause of its crash is unknown. If we had real-time GPS monitoring of airliners, chances are we'd have wreckage in-hand.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by toomuchtodo on Monday January 05, 2015 @06:01PM (#8841842)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecovered_flight_reco...

17 unrecovered black boxes since 1965. I don't think that calls for spending tens of millions of dollars considering ADS-B and Iridium will have the problem solved in the next few years: http://www.aireon.com/AboutAireon/AnIridiumInnovation

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by toomuchtodo on Monday January 05, 2015 @05:14PM (#8841582)

MH370 was rare. You typically have a small search space with a downed aircraft, and the black box announces itself acoustically underwater for up to 30 days.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by marcosdumay on Monday January 05, 2015 @05:59PM (#8841828)

Missing a few blackboxes does not make all that difference in practice. Whatever happened with the plane was probably related in other flights already, and if it's really something that never repeated anywhere, it's not worth protecting against anyway.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by marcosdumay on Monday January 05, 2015 @09:38PM (#8842634)

s\related\reported\

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by zck on Monday January 05, 2015 @05:02PM (#8841513)

"Hey, a plane went down right here. Want to send all your boats to see if anyone survived?"

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by marcosdumay on Monday January 05, 2015 @05:55PM (#8841806)

Great! Get that boat there (in the middle of an ocean) in less than 16 minutes, or everybody will be dead anyway.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by rochester8 on Monday January 05, 2015 @07:00PM (#8842099)

... ok. There are a LOT of boats in the world. How long could it possibly take to get the nearest one anywhere a plane goes down, anywhere in the world? Five minutes? Ten?

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by marcosdumay on Monday January 05, 2015 @09:37PM (#8842629)

Well, sorry about the uninformative answer. I was in a rush...

Anyway, 6 minutes (not 16) is the time people are usually expected to still be alive in a plane after it gets on fire. Airports spend a lot to get cars on their area fast enough for rescue, there's simple no chance boats can get anywhere in the oceans that fast - when a plane falls on the water boats need days to get there. And all "the nearest boat" will do is catching fire together with the plane, you need well equipped boats with trained people.

Anyway, I'm having a hard time trying to imagine a scenario where airplane tracking fails, but people are still alive. I'm about to claim that's currently impossible, but that'd be just asking for a counterexample to happen and prove me wrong... When planes disappear, it's because they were either completely destroyed in air or hit the ocean at a huge speed.

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Re:An airline that has made sure its airplanes won't disappear by mikeash on Monday January 05, 2015 @01:46PM (#8840356)

It doesn't save lives on the disappeared plane, but it may save lives in the future. If, for example, the cause of MH370's disappearance is something that could happen to others, and can be remedied at a reasonable cost, being able to find out what that cause is and how to remedy it would save lives in the future.

A low priority, but not nothing.

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