BOEING 767F crash near Houston in the bay Atlas cargo

Bell206 said:
In short I'm skeptical weather caused a direct effect, but I do see enormous potential for a sudden, rough ride here, and that could have been the first event in a chain that led to something like a CG shift or loss of a control surface (from fatigue, improper maintenance, design issue, something like the 737 in Colorado Springs, etc).
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Thanks for the write up and detailed analysis
 
Regarding the insinuation of suicide. Crazy conclusion to immediately jump to, especially considering
-weather in the area
-why wait until you are on approach
-no sign of a struggle or anything leading up to it

If you compare this to an ACTUAL attempted suicide mission like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705 or other ones there is usually quite a struggle on board and the radar track from this 767 would likely have revealed that.. not https://www.flightglobal.com/news/a...rew-appeared-to-be-trying-to-avoid-we-456051/ a crew working together trying to avoid weather

What sucks is that without CVR or black box data we're going to know very little. I shudder to think that the small (relatively) sized black box is sitting somewhere 5 feet deep in thick mud

PS - with our phones constantly connected to the internet, I can't figure out why black boxes and CVRs aren't in constant communication with a cloud based database system. Surely there are orders of magnitude more phones than their are commercial planes in the sky?
 
Tantalum said:
Regarding the insinuation of suicide. Crazy conclusion to immediately jump to, especially considering
-weather in the area
-why wait until you are on approach
-no sign of a struggle or anything leading up to it

If you compare this to an ACTUAL attempted suicide mission like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705 or other ones there is usually quite a struggle on board and the radar track from this 767 would likely have revealed that.. not https://www.flightglobal.com/news/a...rew-appeared-to-be-trying-to-avoid-we-456051/ a crew working together trying to avoid weather

What sucks is that without CVR or black box data we're going to know very little. I shudder to think that the small (relatively) sized black box is sitting somewhere 5 feet deep in thick mud

PS - with our phones constantly connected to the internet, I can't figure out why black boxes and CVRs aren't in constant communication with a cloud based database system. Surely there are orders of magnitude more phones than their are commercial planes in the sky?
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That was my thought when MH370 went missing. Why not have at least a basic packet of info live-streaming to temporary data storage? From what I understand some engines are built to do this with engine data.
 
^ been wondering the same about cloud sync for years. guessing there are folks in the industry who can answer "why not".

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CRQFlier said:
^ been wondering the same about cloud sync for years. guessing there are folks in the industry who can answer "why not".

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Because it costs money. Getting another box and antenna certified on a transport category aircraft isn't an inexpensive undertaking and nobody wants to pay the up-front costs or the ongoing costs of the monitoring service.
 
kyleb said:
Because it costs money. Getting another box and antenna certified on a transport category aircraft isn't an inexpensive undertaking and nobody wants to pay the up-front costs or the ongoing costs of the monitoring service.
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This part doesn't compute. The engines already send packets of data periodically back to RR, PW, etc. Every person sitting in their seats can watch Real-Housewives-of-Who-Gives-A-F#ck. You can surf the web in the middle of the Pacific on a 40 foot sail boat.. but an airliner can't send small packets periodically? $1,000 will buy you a phone that will push you Facebook notifications, Tweets, and Instaselfies, and other nonsense 24/7. A sat phone is a few hundred bucks

There must be other reasons this hasn't taken place.
 
That would not help find the black box though. Bury your phone underwater, under 5-10 ft of mud and see how well you can find it then... :/
 
Tantalum said:
This part doesn't compute. The engines already send packets of data periodically back to RR, PW, etc. Every person sitting in their seats can watch Real-Housewives-of-Who-Gives-A-F#ck. You can surf the web in the middle of the Pacific on a 40 foot sail boat.. but an airliner can't send small packets periodically? $1,000 will buy you a phone that will push you Facebook notifications, Tweets, and Instaselfies, and other nonsense 24/7. A sat phone is a few hundred bucks

There must be other reasons this hasn't taken place.
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Between them, the two black boxes on transport aircraft record almost 100 different inputs on a continuous basis. That's a lot of data to record and transmit. The only way to guarantee you'll get the important parts of the information is to have that data uploaded continuously. A gap of 30 seconds between packets might have resulted in the 767 in this thread going from "All is fine" to the crash in such a short time that no relevant data was sent. So, if you really want to transmit and record the same level of data you'd get from a flight recorder, that turns into a lot of data.

And, like I alluded to, getting any new piece of hardware approved and installed on an airliner is a big deal. Haven't I seen reports that ADS-B installs are $100k/airframe on the big iron? Even at half that amount, Delta, SW and all of the other carriers are going to balk because of initial and and ongoing expenses.
 
dans2992 said:
That would not help find the black box though
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The point is to negate the need for a black box. Just stream the data back

How much does an airplane cost? How much do lawsuits from families cost? How much do increased regulations cost the industry? It can be done. The technology exists, and is literally already in use (engine data getting sent back, IFE, etc.) but as a society we're relatively short sighted
upload_2019-2-25_23-23-48.png
 
Maybe. I mean the engine data does not come back _instantly_. I would guess it’s only every so many minutes and it’s batched. In order for this to replace a black box, it would probably need to leave the aircraft within a second or two.

The engine data is probably a few integers. Not full cockpit audio, complete diagnostics, etc.
 
kyleb said:
Between them, the two black boxes on transport aircraft record almost 100 different inputs on a continuous basis. That's a lot of data to record and transmit. The only way to guarantee you'll get the important parts of the information is to have that data uploaded continuously. A gap of 30 seconds between packets might have resulted in the 767 in this thread going from "All is fine" to the crash in such a short time that no relevant data was sent. So, if you really want to transmit and record the same level of data you'd get from a flight recorder, that turns into a lot of data.

And, like I alluded to, getting any new piece of hardware approved and installed on an airliner is a big deal. Haven't I seen reports that ADS-B installs are $100k/airframe on the big iron? Even at half that amount, Delta, SW and all of the other carriers are going to balk because of initial and and ongoing expenses.
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Honestly, all of this is easily solvable with adopting basic compression, buffering, token exchange, etc. Yes I get that everything in commercial aviation is some multiple more expensive than a consumer delivery. But there's not much technologically ground breaking here.

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CRQFlier said:
Honestly, all of this is easily solvable with adopting basic compression, buffering, token exchange, etc. Yes I get that everything in commercial aviation is some multiple more expensive than a consumer delivery. But there's not much technologically ground breaking here.
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The main problems with all of the ideas I've seen so far regarding continuous remote flight data tracking aren't really technical for the most part, except for something you touched on: Compression, buffering, etc all takes *time*. Sometimes, the things that happen in the last few seconds really are important, so IMO the transmission of that data cannot completely replace the onboard FDR.

That's not to say I'm against the idea. Anything we can do to make it easier to find the FDR and CVR after an accident is helpful, so having a pseudo-continuous feed of aircraft position, speed, altitude, and track - the basics - would be helpful IMO. I just don't think that every aircraft sending every parameter all the time is particularly practical.

Maybe we could have an "extended feed" that would be triggered by operations outside a certain set of parameters, but again, getting that data boxed up and sent out before the equipment is destroyed may not happen.
 
Nothing like advocating for the exorbitant costs of live streaming black box data for every airline or similar aircraft so that we can take up crap loads of “cloud” storage for 99.9% of uneventful flights. It would only come into use if you can’t locate the black box, which is fairly rare in terms of already-rare airline crashes. Smart financial move . . .
 
kyleb said:
Because it costs money. Getting another box and antenna certified on a transport category aircraft isn't an inexpensive undertaking and nobody wants to pay the up-front costs or the ongoing costs of the monitoring service.
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The ADSB upgrade is causing enough headaches, and is insanely expensive already, for commercial aircraft.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Nothing like advocating for the exorbitant costs of live streaming black box data for every airline or similar aircraft so that we can take up crap loads of “cloud” storage for 99.9% of uneventful flights. It would only come into use if you can’t locate the black box, which is fairly rare in terms of already-rare airline crashes. Smart financial move . . .
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You beat me to it.

Over the past 20 years, there's been 10 aircraft incidents where either the FDR or CVR (or both) weren't able to be retrieved. Two of those were AAL and UAL on 9/11. Two of those, the FDR was recovered, but the CVR was not. One of the 10, the plane was stolen. So, maybe 5 in the past 20 years.

This seems like a solution looking for a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecovered_flight_recorders
 
Tantalum said:
The point is to negate the need for a black box. Just stream the data back

How much does an airplane cost? How much do lawsuits from families cost? How much do increased regulations cost the industry? It can be done. The technology exists, and is literally already in use (engine data getting sent back, IFE, etc.) but as a society we're relatively short sighted
View attachment 72023
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You’d still need the black box. And since the black box works and since no regulator has required streaming it hasn’t happened. How many crashes are there in the US of transport category aircraft each year?

For perspective we still have airliners out there without gps or ads-b.


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Tantalum said:
There must be other reasons this hasn't taken place.
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It does take place, but only when the end user wants to pay the uplink/data costs. The reason they knew how long MH370 flew was the engine OEM paid the engine uplink costs. In the AF447 accident, they knew 60% of the failure mode as it happened because AF paid to have select mx data uploaded to improve mx turnaround rates. So its all about the money.

As to justifying the costs of uploading GBs of data vs aircraft cost or lawsuits that is what risk-management and insurance costs are for. Two separate topics. But there is only so much airborne bandwidth in the world. Even small upload systems like those used with helicopters in the GOM are rather expensive. And the first thing they do to mitigate cost is get the satelitte data down into ground based as soon as possible. The 1st Outerlink systems would download data from GOM aircraft to Maryland then use phonelines to send it to the com center on the beach.
 
We wouldn't have to limit this strictly for the event of when a black box or CVR can't be found.. if we think outside the box here then having all this data at the fingertips of the beancounters and data analysts at the airliners, manufacturers, etc., could help in many ways. Information is generally a good thing

If we always assumed we were already living in the best of worlds and other advancements are cost prohibitive or unnecessary than progress would never be ma
 
Tantalum said:
We wouldn't have to limit this strictly for the event of when a black box or CVR can't be found.. if we think outside the box here then having all this data at the fingertips of the beancounters and data analysts at the airliners, manufacturers, etc., could help in many ways. Information is generally a good thing

If we always assumed we were already living in the best of worlds and other advancements are cost prohibitive or unnecessary than progress would never be ma
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Not sure about that. It could lead to “overmanagement”. Too much data is sometimes worse than not enough.

Unless the airlines are set to benefit financially, they won’t spend the money.
 
Tantalum said:
We wouldn't have to limit this strictly for the event of when a black box or CVR can't be found.. if we think outside the box here then having all this data at the fingertips of the beancounters and data analysts at the airliners, manufacturers, etc., could help in many ways. Information is generally a good thing

If we always assumed we were already living in the best of worlds and other advancements are cost prohibitive or unnecessary than progress would never be ma
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It's all about how fast you need the data. The airline beancounters and data analysts already get this data, after the plane lands. Ask anyone who's gotten a call from the Flight Operations Quality Assurance department... These other benefits don't require beaming data to a satellite in real time.

I expect that they will find the boxes. It's not deep water. ValuJet 592's was found by someone with a stick that went "thud" instead of "mush" as they were recovering other pieces of the plane. And there are underwater metal detectors, that should help find them in the mud as well.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
Cargo coming loose normally causes issues on takeoff, so that is improbable. Typically it's either secured properly or it isn't.
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I have no personal knowledge of this, but considering that Amazon cargo is relatively light and palletized, I would guess the cargo deck space was full from front to back. Volume, not weight in other words. It seems unlikely the cargo could shift.
 
3393RP said:
I have no personal knowledge of this, but considering that Amazon cargo is relatively light and palletized, I would guess the cargo deck space was full from front to back. Volume, not weight in other words. It seems unlikely the cargo could shift.
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That's another point. I have no knowledge either. And of course my cargo is dog cages, wedged into place in the plane.
 
Tantalum said:
...there was a case of that happening at least once before, National Airlines Flight 102, the 747 that crashed on departure, had an improperly secured vehicle roll back, hit and damage the bulkhead, which damaged hydraulics and made the airplane uncontrollable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_102
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The MRAPs loaded on that aircraft weighed over 30,000 lbs each, so when the rearmost vehicle broke loose, the CG shifted and damage to the aircraft was done in an immediate and fatal manner.

That's very unlikely to happen on an aircraft loaded with lightweight and locked down pallets, and as I said above, there probably wasn't any space in the fuselage for much movement.
 
3393RP said:
The MRAPs loaded on that aircraft weighed over 30,000 lbs each, so when the rearmost vehicle broke loose, the CG shifted in an immediate and fatal manner.

That's very unlikely to happen on an aircraft loaded with lightweight and locked down pallets, and as I said above, there probably wasn't any space in the fuselage for much movement.
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Having flown with parcels in the back, although on a smaller scale, todays mostly air filled packages cause you to bulk out way before you max out weight wise in my experience.


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dans2992 said:
That would not help find the black box though. Bury your phone underwater, under 5-10 ft of mud and see how well you can find it then... :/
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I wonder if it's more like 20-30 feet of mud. That area is nothing but stiff dark clay, and the aircraft was going mighty fast.

The CVR of United Flight 93 was found fifteen feet below the surface of the crater according to media reports. That soil was much denser than the sea of mud in Trinity Bay.
 
"On Feb 26th 2019 the Sheriff reported they discovered the remains of a third human. The search for the black boxes is still ongoing under the oversight of the NTSB."
 
Bell206 said:
It does take place, but only when the end user wants to pay the uplink/data costs. The reason they knew how long MH370 flew was the engine OEM paid the engine uplink costs. In the AF447 accident, they knew 60% of the failure mode as it happened because AF paid to have select mx data uploaded to improve mx turnaround rates. So its all about the money.

As to justifying the costs of uploading GBs of data vs aircraft cost or lawsuits that is what risk-management and insurance costs are for. Two separate topics. But there is only so much airborne bandwidth in the world. Even small upload systems like those used with helicopters in the GOM are rather expensive. And the first thing they do to mitigate cost is get the satelitte data down into ground based as soon as possible. The 1st Outerlink systems would download data from GOM aircraft to Maryland then use phonelines to send it to the com center on the beach.
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Isn't some of the infrastructure in place with the WiFi so many planes have for passengers? That goes up to satellites and then to...wherever.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Isn't some of the infrastructure in place with the WiFi so many planes have for passengers? That goes up to satellites and then to...wherever.
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As a piece of anecdotal evidence, one day we rolled into the gate and a mechanic asked us about a specific problem with the airplane. We had no idea what he was talking about so some sort of connection with our maintenance people was made automatically. I am sure a lot of information can be had automatically if a company has enough interest in making it happen.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Isn't some of the infrastructure in place with the WiFi so many planes have for passengers? That goes up to satellites and then to...wherever.
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While this is outside my skill set, the conversations I've been involved with from the provider/user side is that it's not an "infrastructure" problem. The architecture for this data movement has been available for years, especially as the digital/technical side reinvents itself every 6 months. The issue is market.

For example, 5 years ago you couldn't buy a 65" 4K flat screen for less than $10K. Now they're $675 at Walmart. In our connected world, WiFi on aircraft is no longer a luxury and the cost (market) is shared across provider, middleman, and user. With real-time aircraft operational data streaming via satellite where's the market?

Every modern airliner, basically a 777/330 forward (and some helicopters) has the ability to upload airframe and engine data in real time. As I mentioned above, in the AF447 crash off Brazil, they knew most of the failure sequence from real-time data uploads. However, this data was intended to give the mechanics back in Paris a heads up so they could prepare for the repair prior to the aircraft's arrival.

Bottomline, it's all about the operator paying for the bandwidth and how they can expense it out. But how to you justify the expense when you may only use that data once every 10 years, or in QUANTAS's case, never. It's a bigger discussion than just uploading a few 1s and 0s as I saw during the ADS-B trails and tests in the GOM.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Isn't some of the infrastructure in place with the WiFi so many planes have for passengers? That goes up to satellites and then to...wherever.
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That was my thought.. why not plug *some* kind of system into existing infrastructure. On any given flight you have 200 clowns watching TV, surfing Facebook, doing email, etc. The G1000 stores loads of data on the tiny memory disk.. I doubt we'd need GB of data.. just send a small .txt or .csv every 5 seconds with a handful of core data points

-lat/long
-speed
-heading
-altitude
-VS
-maybe a dozen or so others

^just take a snapshot ever 5 seconds and fire that off somewhere. A groundbased system can then parse the data out of the cloud if and when needed. You could honestly buy a sat phone, raspberry pi, GPS receiver, and a half intelligent person could code this up themselves

But I digress...

**BACK ON TOPIC:
-The weather is obviously a HUGE clue.. however, it could be a red herring. The fact that things came undone so fast is what is fascinating.. I hope they find the CVR and blackboxes soon..!
 
Bell206 said:
Every modern airliner, basically a 777/330 forward (and some helicopters) has the ability to upload airframe and engine data in real time. As I mentioned above, in the AF447 crash off Brazil, they knew most of the failure sequence from real-time data uploads. However, this data was intended to give the mechanics back in Paris a heads up so they could prepare for the repair prior to the aircraft's arrival.
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All that was missing in MH370's could be lat/long data. At least they they'd know where it was

*Big ocean out there. What's crazy was that amateur enthusiasts recovered a handful of parts from the plane. So we know for sure it did crash in the ocean somewhere.. I know there were conspiracy theories circulating!
 
Tantalum said:
All that was missing in MH370's could be lat/long data.
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Exactly. But you'll have to ask Malaysia Airlines why they didn't want to spend the nickel on that. From what I've read, ICAO is looking into requiring operations over "remote" areas to have basic real-time info uplinked on a per-programed cadence.

However, another interesting tact was the discussion after the Egypt Air crash in the Med 8 or 9 years ago. It had a version of a data uplink program onboard that indicated there was smoke in a bathroom and an avionics compartment prior to its disappearance from FL350(?) with no mayday. While there was some surface debris it still left a huge area (1000s of sq miles) to look underwater. Several days after the accident they reevaluated the aircraft's SARSAT signals (all 3 sweeps!) that occurred before the unit sank cutting off the transmission. This evaluation cut the search area down to a radius of less than 5 miles.

So last I read there was a push to modify the use of the SARSAT system in a manner to locate missing aircraft. In MH370's case, there was no SARSAT signal which adds to some of the c-theories the ELT was switched off.
 
Bell206 said:
While this is outside my skill set, the conversations I've been involved with from the provider/user side is that it's not an "infrastructure" problem. The architecture for this data movement has been available for years, especially as the digital/technical side reinvents itself every 6 months. The issue is market.

For example, 5 years ago you couldn't buy a 65" 4K flat screen for less than $10K. Now they're $675 at Walmart. In our connected world, WiFi on aircraft is no longer a luxury and the cost (market) is shared across provider, middleman, and user. With real-time aircraft operational data streaming via satellite where's the market?

Every modern airliner, basically a 777/330 forward (and some helicopters) has the ability to upload airframe and engine data in real time. As I mentioned above, in the AF447 crash off Brazil, they knew most of the failure sequence from real-time data uploads. However, this data was intended to give the mechanics back in Paris a heads up so they could prepare for the repair prior to the aircraft's arrival.

Bottomline, it's all about the operator paying for the bandwidth and how they can expense it out. But how to you justify the expense when you may only use that data once every 10 years, or in QUANTAS's case, never. It's a bigger discussion than just uploading a few 1s and 0s as I saw during the ADS-B trails and tests in the GOM.
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As you mentioned, the cost is getting lower. Delta Airlines would charge me ~$500 for all the internet I want in a year, and I'm sure they are making a profit on that. I can be on one plane at a time, so let that be the price for one aircraft a year. I agree with you the operators won't pay this unless they had to. How to justify the expense? Same way the expense of the "black boxes" are justified. Either lower insurance rates, or mandated by law.
 
Gracious, satellite operators around the world bring down mega bytes of satellite telemetry data per second 24/7. Definitely not a technology problem. Could be a scale problem though; at any given instant there are probably more commercial transport aircraft in the air than total spacecraft launched in the history of mankind.

The bigger issue, to me, is that the most critical data is often the last few seconds, and that time is most susceptible due to data loss, so you would still need the on-board recording capability.
 
They wouldn’t have black boxes by choice or market forces either...

Airbags were once laughed at as expensive options on luxury cars- now they are standard and required outfitting in a stripped down Kia...

For all the advanced technology in flight we at the same time hold onto ancient technology scared of some advances. So much in flight we rely on redundancy- redundancy here would only make sense. That data isn’t just about what happened for curiosity sake on a single given accident plane but to prevent it from happening again...So even as rare as crashes are, even one cargo plane where info is not recovered could be risking the lives of thousands of others hopping on a passenger version. 100% success in getting data should be the goal and we shouldn’t easily accept anything less...
 
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