Meat Plow wrote:
On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:47:44 +1000, Bob Larter
wrote:

Smitty Two wrote:
In article ,
Bob Larter wrote:

Smitty Two wrote:
In article ,
"Arfa Daily" wrote:

Still, apparently, they have now located some wreckage 400 miles out into
the Atlantic, so I guess that they have around 28 days left to locate and
recover the CVR and FDR boxes, which apparently are likely to be lying in
around 13000 feet of water. Seems like the batteries for the pingers are
good for about 30 days, and the transmitter is just about man enough to
get
a signal through 15000 feet of salt water. I guess that if they can
recover
them and they continued to function for any time after the initial
'event',
then we could know quite quickly what the primary cause of it going down
was.
This whole "black box recovery" stuff seems silly to me. Given the
number of accidents in which the recorders are never found, or when
found are FUBAR, and given today's communications technology, I don't
know why data isn't being constantly streamed to ground recording
centers.
Technically, that'd be a bit tricky on (for example) a trip between New
York & London.
Really? So transatlantic flights are out of contact with flight control?
I honestly don't know, but I assume they would be for at least part of
the trip. But even if I'm wrong about that, I doubt that there'd be the
bandwidth available for every plane in the air to be continuously
streaming 20+ channels of telemetry, etc, back to base.

Commercial lines have GPS tracking and sat communications if needed.
Plus there are many HF channels for flight control and military
tracking stations located strategically upon small islands, atolls,
etc.. that would surely assist commercial aviators.

Yeah, but Jeez, that'd be an incredible effort to go to!

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------