Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s Predicament Demonstrates How Questionable Engineering Can Cause What Should Have Been Avoidable Problems

06 April 2014

Let me get this straight . . .

We design a passenger aircraft in which one can:

turn off the radar transponder while in flight — making the aircraft effectively disappear,

kill all its passengers, merely by shutting off their oxygen supply and climbing — even in the absence of any indications that there is a fire in progress,

lock oneself inside an impenetrable cockpit while doing all this,

while

the plane is carting around a black box that signals for only 1 month

and is only audible 1 mile underwater,

but

was otherwise designed to survive a 3.8 mile submersion depth.

The combination of the last two elements illustrates the low level of thought that goes into designing many of our systems

From Bloomberg News:

While designed to operate at depths of 3.8 miles, the range of the beacons’ pings is a mile, according to manuals from Honeywell International (HON) Inc., the maker of the equipment.

That may make the signals hard to detect even if an underwater microphone is over the correct location.

Since 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is ocean, much of it deep, and passenger airplanes fly over it regularly, one would think that someone would have anticipated that maybe it would be a good idea to make black boxes a little more findable under water:

In the search for wreckage of Air France (AF) Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil in 2009, authorities were able to focus on a 6,700-square-mile area after finding objects adrift five days following the crash. They also had a last known position and four minutes of signals from a messaging system dubbed Acars, which was shut off on Flight 370.

Even with those clues, the pings from Flight 447’s recorders weren’t picked up. It took two voyages over almost a two-year period to find the debris field with unmanned underwater vehicles.

The moral? — If it is even remotely possible for human beings to be abysmally stupid, we will be

The Flight 370 fiasco would be laughable, if it were not so sad.

PeteFree.com

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s Predicament Demonstrates How Questionable Engineering Can Cause What Should Have Been Avoidable Problems