• MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    The black box isn’t like a modern hard drive, with terabytes of storage. They’re often old, and even the modern ones need to put so much effort into protection against things like fire, seawater and collisions that they don’t have as much space as you might imagine.

    They have to rely on someone going out of their way to take the box out, or shut down the plane, because the alternative would be for them to have some way to decide for themselves to stop recording. If they could do that then a false positive would cause them to miss potentially important data, so they’re designed to keep going until someone makes it stop

    • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      That sounds like something they need to improve on then. Two hours is a ridiculously short amount of time given the tech we have in 2024.

      • MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        I didn’t say anything like that. The black box is physically much bigger than a modern SSD, but stores far less data because of all the extra problems it has to deal with

          • MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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            10 months ago

            Being hit by a truck, then catching fire and being allowed to burn while doused in jet fuel for a while before being dunked in seawater for a few days.

            I’ll bet you can’t find an SSD which can do that.

          • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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            10 months ago

            Of-the-shelf SSDs are optimized for speed and price.

            Flight recorders are typically specified to withstand an impact of 3400 g and temperatures of over 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), exposure to salt water, and high pressure if it sinks to the bottom of the sea as required by EUROCAE ED-112.

            Maybe you could design a flight recorder that uses SSDs, but then you must get it certified again for the new hardware, which will cost a lot of money nobody wants to spend. The next step in flight recorders is to also send a live feed of telemetric data back to some ground station so the last position of the plane is known - with a flight recorder you only get this data after you found the wreck. Currently submitting this signal is optional and can be turned of by the pilot, which is the reason why Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing.

            • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Maybe you could design a flight recorder that uses SSDs,

              Maybe? Really?

              which will cost a lot of money nobody wants to spend.

              I think this is probably more of the answer. Capitalism 101.

          • Dyf_Tfh@lemmy.sdf.org
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            10 months ago

            Black box were Solid State Drive before SSD were common, the advantages of no moving parts are simply too high.

              • Dyf_Tfh@lemmy.sdf.org
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                9 months ago

                Yes, in the EU the minimum recording time was recently increased to 25h. It is not a tech limitation anymore. What is actually limiting are privacy concerns from misuse of the longer recording.

                • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  What kind of privacy data would be on a black box recorder? Just banter between flight crew? They are in a work environment so the recorded conversations should be kept professional anyway, IMO.

              • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                This is why we can’t have nice things.

                “I don’t understand the problem, therefore it must be simple and anyone not saying it’s simple is obviously wrong”

                • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  Is it really a matter of how easy it is or how much it would cost to change it? I’m also talking about making a nicer/better version so I really don’t understand your can’t have nice things statement.