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Product: Emergency Rescue
Downed Plane Transponder   (+2)  [vote for, against]
Tethered transponder for downed flights

We've all seen it before. A flight goes down in the ocean and there's a search for the wreckage. Unfortunately, because of the way planes are built, everything splinters and shatters, and either sinks to the bottom, or remains floating but drifts off way before any search party arrives. This idea is for a simple tethered device to deploy upon inundation of a piece of the plane. Let's put it into the tail of th wing. Once the tail detects that it is indeed sinking, a small charge is set off, releasing a bouy and a long, thin line (4 miles?) that allows it to mark exactly where the plane hit the water. Days of expensive searching and tension could be avoided if they knew exactly where to dive to find the wreckage.
-- twitch, Sep 20 2010

Distress radiobeacon http://en.wikipedia...istress_radiobeacon
Wikipedia on current technology. [baconbrain, Sep 21 2010]

I worked on some prototypes for some similar oceanagraphic tech thingys back in the the 80's. Engineering challenges abound.
-- normzone, Sep 21 2010


What [norm] said.
-- 8th of 7, Sep 21 2010


Sounds like a good idea to me.

But also, is there no transponder which will give a signal when underwater, which is detectable from the surface? Maybe even a simple sonar thing that goes ping ping ping, loudly enough to be detectable by a hydrophone from a few tens of miles away?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 21 2010


The idea is that the beacon is buoyant, but tethered to airframe by a line.
-- 8th of 7, Sep 21 2010


Contrary to popular belief, the flight recording devices are often damaged beyond use so they don't tell crash investigators what happened.

Take TWA 800, for instance. The recorders got everything that happened up to about 15,000 ft then stopped recording when a catastrophic explosion in an inner starboard wing tank took everything apart. The recorder boxes were ripped open and inundated, damaging the data already recorded though they were easy to recover, being in only 100ft of water.

Making them buoyant implies less robust construction and therefore even less value to investigators, I fear.
-- infidel, Sep 21 2010


why not make multiple blackboxes? Making 10 less robust blackboxes might be cheaper and more reliable than 1 really robust one.
-- twitch, Nov 23 2010


wot about flying boats then ?
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 23 2010


Actually, port and starboard are widely used in reference to planes. The exception (I believe) is the navy, whose planes have "left" and "right", to avoid confusion with the "port" and "starboard" of the aircraft carrier.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 23 2010


By an interesting coincidence, I recently visted the bridge of an aircraft carrier,and was informed that the terms "right" and "left" are used, there.
-- mouseposture, Nov 23 2010


Shirly modern tech can make black boxes pretty cheap and tough? I mean, to record all the data on the aircraft you'll need.... oooh, a truncated RaspberryPi and a 32gig micro SD card? Thick rubber box, hide 1 under each seat if you like...
-- bs0u0155, Jul 10 2013


...and run a huge cable trunk to it.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 12 2013


Alternatively, the first hacker on board might use the system to fly to Disneyland. Where there's a connection...
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 12 2013


// But also, is there no transponder which will give a signal when underwater, which is detectable from the surface? Maybe even a simple sonar thing that goes ping ping ping, loudly enough to be detectable by a hydrophone from a few tens of miles away? //

The "black boxes" that are actually orange have those. I think Big Clive has a video of disassembling one. Maybe somebody else.

// Making them buoyant implies less robust construction and therefore even less value to investigators, I fear. //

If you take the current ones and wrap them in foam, won't that both float them and cushion them? They'll be bigger, though.

My variation: Inside the vertical stabilizer (which, on most large planes, is disproportionate-lookingly large), mount a cannon, pointing diagonally upward and backward. It can be much lighter than a regular cannon, because it only needs to fire once. Upon an (imminent or presently occurring) impact detected by whatever sensor at the plane's nose, it fires a beacon that deploys a parachute at the top of its trajectory. (If the impact is occurring presently with a vertical wall, and the cannon is aimed more upward than backward, the beacon should be launched with as little speed as possible and the parachute should be deployed immediately, I guess.)
-- notexactly, Dec 03 2018


// It can be much lighter than a regular cannon, because it only needs to fire once. //

Hmmm, someone has been studying the Little Boy design specs ...

Why a cannon ? For a single-use device, a rocket has many advantages. The launcher is much lighter, the propellant's slightly less hazardous, and it's a very reliable and well-proven technology. A two-stage rocket can make a low-speed launch to clear the empennage - even using cold high-pressure inert gas - and then the second stage (in the same physical casing) can drive it clear.

The real solution to this is to enhance ACARS (or build a similar system) so that all flight data are stored remotely.
-- 8th of 7, Dec 03 2018


A rocket might be too slow to get away, if the crash is presently occurring. I wanted to get the beacon out of the way of the ground/ocean/cliff ASAP.

Aren't there a few satellites that collect the ADS-B signals now? And somebody on Hackaday.io was designing a system of small robotic boats for the same purpose a few years ago.
-- notexactly, Dec 06 2018



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