In this age of advanced communications and GPS it seems stupid that airliner black boxes are so ineffective, as seen in the disappearance of flight 370. So make them smarter. There should be a dozen or more on every airliner, attached to the OUTSIDE of the plane, and nobody connected to the plane can turn them off. When these smart black boxes (SBB) detect any kind of catastrophic motion, they go into action. They should eject from the plane upon impact, inflate, and give off signals so the location of the crash can be quickly discovered.

 

I'm sure any engineer can think of better SBB than I can.

Edited March 21, 201411 yr by Airbrush

Are you willing to pay more for your tickets to accommodate this?

How expense could they be? Cell phones have GPS. Just design a device that is small, maybe only inches in diameter, deploys upon impact, floats, and gives off a signal. What's so expensive about an inflatable buoy, solar powered, with a cheep transmitter?

Edited March 21, 201411 yr by Airbrush

A typical GPS device is a receiver, not a sender. AFAIK flight recorders come equipped with transmitters, probably with a few km in range. A cheap, tiny solar powered emitter would probably have a range of a few meters.

I posted this again in "Engineering" under "Better Black Boxes for Airliners". Anyone interested join us over there. All I will say to the previous post is, suppose the transmitter is weak because it is solar powered, isn't there a powerful detection device that can scan the surface of the ocean (or land) for a weak transmitter?

 

Now, see you in "Engineering".