Air France 447 Black Boxes Readable 116
An anonymous reader writes "It's not a lengthy press release, but it's good news: the memory cards for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the Air France 447 crash in 2009, recently recovered from the sea floor almost two years later, are readable. The data was recovered over the weekend and includes the full two hours of cockpit recording. Apparently it will take weeks for analysis of the data, but it looks like the challenging recovery effort is paying off in a big way. Hopefully detailed answers about the cause of the crash will follow."
Pretty amazing tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Penetration Resistance 500 lb. weight from 10 feet
Static Crush 5000 lbs., 5 minutes
High Temperature Fire 1100 C, 30 minutes
Low Temperature Fire 260 C, 10 hours
Deep Sea Pressure and 20,000 feet, 30 days
Sea Water/Fluids Immersion Per ED-56a
The CSMU design has been fully qualified to these requirements and, in fact, exceeds them by considerable margin in key survival areas:
Impact shock has been successfully demonstrated at 4800 G's
High temperature fire exposure has been tested to 60 minutes
Low temperature fire was tested immediately after exposure to 1100 C fire.
From here [scribd.com]. Check out the physical design on page 8.
Re:I wonder if NOVA got it right. (Score:5, Interesting)
This was a very interesting documentary [pbs.org]. I was particularly interested in the inferences about the user interface approach of Airbus versus Boeing. In short, Airbus planes are controlled with joysticks that translate pilot intentions into actual executable commands to the control surfaces. If the pilot tells the computer to do something stupid, the computer won't do it. Contrast this with Boeing, where the pilots control the plane with a proper control stick that gives more effective feedback to the pilots. In a Boeing airplane, when the computer lowers engine power on autopilot, the engine control lever actually moves in a very visible way. However, on Airbus planes, the levers DO NOT move. The only indication to a pilot that the power has dropped is a small circular readout on a computer screen. The Nova scientists theorized that the pilots didn't realize that the computer had lowered power in anticipation of flying through a thunderstorm, or at least that they realized it too late. They theorize that for about a minute the pilots were flying the plane as if the engines were on high power, when they were actually on a much lower power setting. This, combined with a lack of reliable airspeed data may have caused the pilots to put the plane in an unrecoverable mode of flight. Or maybe it was different. We will know soon enough.
BTW, for those of you outside the US, the above video link won't work. I think the video is on bittorrent somewhere. It is definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it.