AF 447 Flight Recorder Found In the Atlantic 218
romiz writes "The memory of the flight recorder for the Air France 447 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed on June 1st 2009, has been found on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, and brought back to the surface in good shape. This is the data recorder, which saves the flight parameters. The search is still continuing in hope of finding the voice recorder containing the sounds recorded in the plane's cockpit."
Amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
The memory of the flight recorder for the Air France 447 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed on June 1st 2009, has been found on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean...
When you look at the twisted mass of wreckage the flight recorder came from, finding the data unit is a miracle. Thousands of feet underwater, working remotely in a pile of twisted metal and they find a little memory unit. I have trouble finding my car keys some days.
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I have trouble finding my car keys some days.
I'm sure if you spent a couple dozen million dollars, you would find your car keys very quickly.
Meh. (Score:2, Insightful)
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I have trouble finding my car keys some days.
I'm sure if you spent a couple dozen million dollars, you would find your car keys very quickly.
Surely at that price it would be more cost effective to just buy a new car every day. $24M @ $30k per car would get you 800 days or over 2 years before you have to go searching for another day's car. If you drive a cheaper car and/or buy in bulk you could probably push that to 3 1/2 years. Or better yet buy or fit one out so that it's keyless. Of course your car won't be as cool as anything that can submerge a few thousand feet and still operate, but hey thems the breaks kid.
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1% interest rate on $24M would be enough to pay the annual salaries of chauffeurs 24/7 to sit in your driveway holding your keys, for life.
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Surely at that price it would be more cost effective to just buy a new car every day. $24M @ $30k per car would get you 800 days or over 2 years before you have to go searching for another day's car. If you drive a cheaper car and/or buy in bulk you could probably push that to 3 1/2 years. Or better yet buy or fit one out so that it's keyless. Of course your car won't be as cool as anything that can submerge a few thousand feet and still operate, but hey thems the breaks kid.
If you're looking for cost effectiveness, why not just buy an endless supply of spare keys? Or one keyfinder [amazon.com]?
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Of euros. I think it's worth mentioning that the French found it. Not that they've been fast tho , but credit where it's due ;-)
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
With more than a little of help from the Americans at WHOI [whoi.edu].
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Did you help the French find the memory unit? WHO, I?
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But this is the English language. Not only will we add an "s", we might even throw in an apostrophe or two for good measure.
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Only if you're a grocer.
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we might even throw in an apostrophe or two for good measure.
Pretty sure that's not the English language, but just wrong.
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But this is the English language. Not only will we add an "s", we might even throw in an apostrophe or two for good measure.
I'd give you a bonus "e" for no extra charge!
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Huh. I never recognized how that might be weird for English native speakers. English has "regular" count nouns and mass nouns (like water, which you can't use with a numeral *five waters). German has those, and an additional "countable mass noun" category, also used for other units like pound. You could still say "10 Euros", but you'd be referring to ten individual coins. I can't come up with any noun in English that acts quite the same way, though there are examples in English that don't fit into the count
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I can't come up with any noun in English that acts quite the same way, though there are examples in English that don't fit into the count noun/mass noun distinction, either.
Sheep. One sheep. Ten sheep.
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Well, sheep is usually analysed as being a count noun with an identical plural and singular form. What I am looking for is a noun that has a single form which can be used in both a singular and plural context (like sheep), but which also has a plural form with an additional/different meaning used in exceptional (ie. unusual/rare) situations. It really makes most sense with units, imagine someone saying "bring me 4 litres of water" to stress that they want 4 individual one litre bottles as opposed to a one g
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You can eat one fish, or you can eat two fish. However you can eat several different types of fishes. I think that works?
Or am I missing it...
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What I am looking for is a noun that has a single form which can be used in both a singular and plural context (like sheep)
People/peoples?
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Maybe. Bizarrely, you would say "I met two people" to refer to two individuals, and "two peoples" to refer to "tribes", so you'd think the plural has that second meaning. However, if you use the word with a singular numeral "we are one people", you're using a singular word form with the "tribal" meaning. Referring to an individual using "people" would seem to be impossible (unlike "one Euro").
Incredible what language users have to put up with. :)
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deer, elk, moose, buffalo, bison, beer [in canada, generally but not always], fish.
There are a bunch more but I can't seem to think of many non-animal ones. :-)
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I'm aware of those, but they're really not what I'm looking for. See my reply to your sibling [slashdot.org] who pointed out "sheep".
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Like with my first wife: I would say "toe-MAY-toe" and she would say "Oh shut the fuck up."
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
This is quite possibly one of the best examples of just how far underwater robotics have come. They literally found something that is harder to find then a needle in a haystack by several orders of magnitude.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
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What is the gas for?
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What is the gas for?
Fun.
Although, I'm not sure how the magnet will help you find a charred pine needle in a mess like that...
I always wondered why some other sort of needle would be mixed in with hay.
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If you're going to charge spectators for watching the conflaguration, you gotta make it spectacular.
Mythbusters did it (Score:2)
They also used some needles made of bone, so the magnet was useless. Dunking in water did the trick, hay floats bone sinks.
Not really (Score:2)
The recorder has pingers in it, and even if they go dead, sidescan sonar makes it little more than a matter of time.
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Requirement on black box pingers life time is at least several weeks iirc. This is why they searched for quite a long time on the first time, and intensified the search towards end-of-life of pingers.
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You're vastly overestimating the effectiveness of sidescan sonar. The CSMU [sea-avionics.com] is about 5" in diameter and 9" long. If the longer dimension generated a 1 pixel wide sonar return, a 1x1 km search area would be 1 pixel among 19 million. The search area for AF447 ranged from about 250 to 2000 sq km. 1 pixel mixed in with numerous other 1 pixel returns from rocks, trash, debris, etc. (if you've e
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Finding something this sm
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When you look at the twisted mass of wreckage the flight recorder came from, finding the data unit is a miracle.
I miracle would have been some deity appearing in the cockpit on that fateful night and telling the guys how to not get into this mess.
Finding this flight recorder is simply a great achievement of science, technology and perseverance.
I really wish people would stop calling great examples of human ingenuity with no evidence of divine intervention "miracles".
"Miracle on the Hudson" my ass!
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Napoleonic law. Brought to you by the country which brought you Napoleon. Let's hear it for the French. [sound of zero hands clapping]
I don't get this (Score:2)
Hmm, how about from now on they'll just box an iPhone; then at least you know for sure that the location is known
gps? on the ocean floor? (Score:5, Insightful)
turn in your nerd credentials for thinking that would work
additionally, flight data recorders do send out a ping for 30 days:
http://boingboing.net/2009/06/03/miles-obrien-bloggin.html [boingboing.net]
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What about making the container so that it is able to float? Should be a matter of making the container airtight and creating enough uplift.
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While also being securely attached to the airframe? Airframe sinks, that's a big flotation device required.
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Trying to solve one problem at the time ;-)
This problem was a device burried at the oceanic floorbed that took 2+ years to recover. The 'i am here' distress signal consists of 30 days worth of 'pings' that in itself requires a probe far down to be able to hear the pings.
But you are right, if it is bolted to the airframe, then a big flotation device is required.
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Depends on the airframe. If instead of a tissue-thick aluminium airframe you had something better able to absorb the shock of impact, you should be fine. Your only requirement is that the mass of water displaced by a largely-intact airframe exceeds the mass of that airframe. Well, after making an airframe capable of plunging 20,000 feet into storm-churned ocean waters without disintegrating either on the way down or when it hits the water.
(This isn't impossible. If the wings and tail are designed to break a
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I was thinking it could grip it by the husk.
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Then it would drift, making it harder to find. Having it sink means less chance of ocean currents pulling it. The ideal would be to have the container capable of anchoring itself if totally detached from the airframe.
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Why would you want it to float away from the wreckage?
So then it can use GPS?
It would require a huge amount of flotation material to get it to float.
How about a balloon that will eject from the inside and inflate automatically with compressed air?
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How about a balloon that will eject from the inside and inflate automatically with compressed air?
That would probably work, but you'd have to ensure that it separated from the wreckage, and then that you found it before the balloon deflated. If it goes to the seabed with the wreckage, then you can find it by finding the rest of the plane, which is relatively easy to spot because of its size. If the flight recorder floats at sea for a month and then sinks to the seabed you'll never find it because it's small and could be thousands of miles from the crash site.
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Why would you want it to float away from the wreckage?
So then it can use GPS?
Honest question... why do you want the Flight Data Recorder to use GPS? It knows perfectly well where it is. It's us that don't know where it is. My understanding is that in GPS, it's the satellites that do the transmitting.
Regardless, KISS seriously applies here. A FDR is intended to be massively robust not feature-laden. And so it should be. Less variables in locating it is a Good Thing. Recovery specialists don't need to wonder "did it float away and the transmitter failed or is it laying on the o
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Yeah, about that
They didn't find the Underwater Locator Beacon attached to the memory unit.
So it may have been torn apart/damaged during impact
Besides, it's a poor system. I mean, they never got any signal from them, but they had several confusing signals.
Re:I don't get this (Score:5, Informative)
Does somebody know why it's so hard for them to find it? I would assume that it's properly secured against crashes, and has a GPS/transmitter on board? What causes this to be so hard?
Inside the data recorder it's attached to a pinger which sends out a sound pulse on a regular basis for about a month after a crash; that makes it easy to find if the recorder stays intact and it's in relatively shallow water, but in this case it's so far down that the pinger was barely audible during the first search (it wasn't detected during the search and only found by post-search processing of the recorded audio data) and the various layers in the ocean reflect sound so it's hard to track. Obviously the batteries died long ago so the only way to find it now was to look for an orange cylinder on the seabed.
Re:I don't get this (Score:4, Funny)
Got a GPS?
Good.
Now, go jump in a lake with it.
Where are you? What? No GPS lock? Oh, that's ok, it still transmits its last known coordinates and you shouldn't be too far from there; I'll just use that signal. Oh... wait, there's no signal. Hmm, that LARGE BODY OF WATER must be blocking it.
No bother, anyway, those coordinates would only be accurate enough to tell me you're at the crash site; something I already know.
Re:I don't get this (Score:4, Interesting)
During an underwater robotics conference I attended, one of the presenters was describing their attempt at using GPS for location fixes every time their autonomous underwater vehicle surfaced in the ocean. They ended up trashing the idea because they found that as little 5 mm of seawater on top of the GPS antenna would prevent a GPS lock.
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That's funny. An intelligently designed autonomous underwater vehicle [webbresearch.com] seems to have no trouble [rutgers.edu] getting GPS fixes when surfaced.
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go jump in a lake
Darwin can only wish.
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Which isn't the point the post I was replying to was trying to make, thus why I didn't mention it.
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Apparently, the audible ping wasn't so helpful, either. LED's are cheap, bright, and probably use a lot less power than the buzzer element that makes the ping, I'm left wondering why the damn thing doesn't just flash.
Flash... Memory... Get it?
Re:I don't get this (Score:4, Informative)
If you're close enough to see a flashing LED you're close enough to see the wreckage. The ping is audible (with the right equipment) through thousands of feet of muddy water. Sound travels farther than light in the ocean.
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The ping is audible (with the right equipment) through thousands of feet of muddy water.
Which is OK until the battery powering the ping runs flat. In water that deep, that's just what you've got to put up with (unless you use something like a RTG, which isn't something I'm too happy with putting in planes as a matter of course, even if it is in a part that's supposed to survive any crash...) [wikipedia.org]
Actually finding the data recorder is impressive stuff, however you cut it. Here's hoping they manage to locate the voice recorder too.
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But sound travels MUCH farther underwater than light will...
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Yes, supposedly it was broadcasting at first -- but you are talking about an incredibly weak signal under 2.5 miles of ocean... Let alone that it can get an accurate GPS lock under water, and you probably have a significant amount of drift during that 2.5 mile descent
Then the additional problem is that the emergency batter
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In my mind the best solution would be to have all data+voice streamed real-time from the airplane to an external source by satellite for the entire flight, so you don't have to depend on locating the black box at all to determine what happened... But from what I've read, the problem there is pilot unions objecting to being recorded and 'monitored' all day long.
No, the problem is that you'd have to spend about $10,000,000,000 to set up such a system and hunting for a recorder on the bottom of the Atlantic every few years is much cheaper.
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Let alone that it can get an accurate GPS lock under water
I would think that it can't get any sort of GPS lock at all when under water. The red side of the spectrum is the first one to go - guess which end of the spectrum radio waves are on.
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Ummm. Yea you don't
1. It is the size of a breadbox.
2. Sank into the ocean.
3. It had a few KM of water column to sink through with currents.
4. I doubt that the aircraft was sending it's postion in realtime all the way to impact. So it had a few KMs of air column to "fall through" with a pretty high rate of forward motion.
5. Just incase you didn't know water blocks radio except for ELF. ELF requires a trailing antenna that is a few KMs long usually. Not really practical for a fight recorders.
6. GPS doesn't u
Now they're looking for the voice recorder? (Score:2)
Why don't they put the voice recorder in the same box, that way if you find one you find them both? For that matter, why don't they put two identical black boxes in the plane, that way searchers have a higher chance of finding at least one of them?
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The voice recorder may be completely destroyed. Keeping them separate decreases the possibility that a single force or impact will destroy both units.
Same reason enterprise IT departments (should) maintain multiple, separate backups of critical data.
Why not replicate the recorders to each other ? (Score:3)
Why if you have 2 flight recorders do they not have the voice replicate to the data and the data to the voice ... that way it you find one you have the complete data set.
I know "crazy talk" but I'm a storage bod and it irks me when people lose VERY important data!
Re:Why not replicate the recorders to each other ? (Score:4, Informative)
Development cycles in Aviation are very long. Technology used is generally very old but well proven. Both recorders are probably jam packed with data with no room to spare and no free space to double up. The newer systems being designed will transmit the data which would now be recorded so it won't have to be scraped off the bottom of the Atlantic.
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As far as I've heard they are thinking of something like that.
But still, that recorder stores around 36Mb of memory.
Of course, the technology for redundant recording of sufficient data is only available for around 10 years now (or maybe less). Remember how USB sticks were around 64Mb in 2004?
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My Guess is... A CVR ( Cockpit Voice Recorders) is on a 30 minute cycle. Write to the end of the (tape ( continuous loop ) / memory module ) reset your pointer back to the begging and start recording over the 30 minute data chuck.
Now these days you could put a terabyte of flash in the things an record hundreds of hours, put the pilots have managed to ensure that only ( last I knew ) 30 minutes is recorded. Additionally in the cockpit there is/ used to be a button labeled CVR Erase which after pulling up
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Additionally in the cockpit there is/ used to be a button labeled CVR Erase which after pulling up to the gate pilots would press because they didn't want chats about their g/f's getting out to their wives.
Or in some cases chatting TO their girlfriends...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1180864/Chilling-recordings-reveal-moments-doomed-Buffalo-flight-killed-50.html [dailymail.co.uk]
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The individual recorders don't have the capacity. Instead, have twice the number of recorders so that both types of data get mirrored. If the backup recorders are as far from the originals as possible, then if the damage wrecks one set there's a good chance the other set will be intact. (The plane is unlikely to break such that two diametrically opposite parts of the plane will impact the ground or water with equal severity.)
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IIRC the data module was part of the data recorder but the recorder was sufficiantly damaged that it became separated.
Flight Recorders are Sooo 20th Century (Score:2)
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Planes can transmit "in real time" much more information than what they record by using the same satellites used for those fancy global radio phones
What nonsense, sat phones are limited to a couple of hundred kbps while modern data recorders can record megabits per second. I doubt the sat phone system as a whole could handle the thousands of planes flying at any one time constantly streaming data at anywhere near full speed either.
What would be practical, and something I've seen in articles about the Air France crash, is streaming a few basic flight parameters so that if the data recorders can't be recovered there is at least some data that can be used
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An even better solution would be a physical recorder on the aircraft and transmission of that data from the aircraft. In this way the information will be protected from either loss of the physical recorder, problems that affect the transmission equipment (e.g. aircraft damage in the region of the antenna) or problems with the ground stations. Also, the volume of data that could be logged on a physical recorder could exceed what could be reasonably transmitted continuously (because it might not possible to t
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What happens if (I know this never happens in real life, LOL) but hypothetically, what happens if something interrupts the communication from the plane, say for example when it is upside-down in a raging thunderstorm plunging towards the ocean surface?
You would still need a backup flight recorder. The advantage of the inflight system is that you might obviate having to find wreckage in a case like the Air France flight, but in exchange you would have to be constantly storing telemetry data from thousands of
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Well over the ocean you would have to use sat phone like tech like iridium which is not fast enough for all the data that a flight recorder keeps. Add in that Aircraft tech takes forever to certify and tends to be used for decades at a time. Global satellites like Iridium are actually still a bit on the new side the network may not be here in 20 years. If a plane starts to tumble or other issues it could stop sending data long before the crash, and finally what about sunspots or other solar events that caus
Redundant Storage on Airliners (Score:2)
Something tells me the world airline safety experts are already debating the update of recorders to offer redundant multiple storage of ALL data from a plane in case of a crash.
Given the nature of storage density these days, I really doubt it would cost much more or take up much more room to have redundant storage. It would seem to require primarily a couple extra cables and connectors.
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It is politics and pilots. Of course they could, see my post earlier about this.
question for pilots (Score:2)
Why don't passenger planes have parachutes under every seat?
Answers along the lines of "because laypeople are stupid hurr" need not apply. Is there good reason which doesn't invoke an argument by authority, point out that 30k feet is too high, or remark that there probably won't be enough time for everyone to get out this way?
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OTH I wonder how you could go if the pilot had the ability to dump all the cargo. I mean all the suitcases and such, not the self loading type though I am sure they have been tempted from time to time.
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You can always take your own parachute if you want. My uncle has a military cargo parachute which he collected as a souvenir from Vietnam. It would pack up fairly tight and would be better than nothing in a free fall situation.
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Rear facing seats would be a big help though.
Re:Needle in a Hay Stack (Score:5, Funny)
All the way.
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On the very bottom, no less!
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How many is that in turtles?
DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK! (Score:4, Informative)
Do not click on above link, it's a shock video.
No mod points or I'd mod it down.
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I would say: the bandwidth you need grows proportionally with the amount of data you transfer. maybe thats the reason. i imagine you can send the most important telemetry data every 10sec using a rate of 300bps but to record pilot and copilot in high quality i think you will need 100 times more. if you have to use SW or satellite, you will be limited.
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Not to mention you'd need the bandwidth on the satellite system to deal with every commercial airliner in the air simultaneously.
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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_between_Airbus_and_Boeing [wikipedia.org] (Deliveries summed)...
Airbus 1989-2011: 6175
Boeing 1989-2011: 9429
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But its intact. You don't want to get four intact bolts and one wrecked recorder.
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How many of the previous identical links marked as trolls did you have to ignore to click this one?
Never, NEVER click a link-shortener in slashdot.