Athens plane crash.

Bandit LOAF said:
It's a very hard to piece together conspiracy - what was the motive? He didn't think the airplane was safe, so just didn't get on... and the rest of the flight crew covered for him? I'm not familiar with how an airplane of this type interacts with flight control, but I'd be willing to bet that the pilot has to communicate with the tower at some point during takeoff - if he were missing alltogether they would have looked at their recordings and figured out that this would be a good news story already.
Click to expand...


No, I was thinking more along the lines of he overslept...was drunk etc. There are police guarding his house right now which doesn't really make sense unless there is more to it than we currently know. Typically, in the US the copilot will land and takeoff the airplane just because its good practice and so they can build up their hands on flight hours, it wouldn't be out of ordinary for just the copilot to check in with the tower. Although I understand a plane wreck is a messy affair...its odd that he is missing and the copilot wasn't. Its odd because no one else out of a flight of 300 people is missing... My understanding is that the voice recorder system was ruined and the flight recorder takes time to be decoded...so I guess we'll see.
 
Maj.Striker said:
No, I was thinking more along the lines of he overslept...was drunk etc. There are police guarding his house right now which doesn't really make sense unless there is more to it than we currently know.
Click to expand...

It's because, for whatever reason, the families of the crash victims are reacting particularly violently. They've been going to the Helios Air ticket counters and screaming at the ticket agents, calling them murderers, and whatnot. I don't understand that reaction based on the information so far, but they're protecting the family of the pilot.

Maj.Striker said:
Although I understand a plane wreck is a messy affair...its odd that he is missing and the copilot wasn't. Its odd because no one else out of a flight of 300 people is missing...
Click to expand...

The flight was only 121 people, but they've only identified a few dozen, so it's not that odd.
 
LarkInFlight said:
And then they should descend ASAP to 4000m or less. They should inform airfield about the problem.. I really don`t know what happend.. It could be another terrorist attack (?). Worf, do you have any flight expirience?
Click to expand...

Actually, I do, a bit. But the number one thing in sudden decompression is oxygen. Descending, informing *someone*, etc. are all secondary considerations. Aircraft safety (of passengers and crew) comes first - and of special importance, the pilot.

Of course, my response was in response to sudden decompression causing instant unconciousness. There are probably many causes in a chain. (You'll note that I'm not speculating at all about what caused the accident - it's something one who flies cannot do - they may be taken as an authoritative source in the absence of real data).

No one knows what happened. Well, the people on the plane do, but unfortunately, they're not in a position to tell us. The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder helps as a rugged witness, but the CVR might be useless as the plane was flying on autopilot for a while (the CVR can only hold the last 30 minutes of recording). Don't know why, in this age of high-density solid-state storage, why a CVR can't record an entire flight.
 
Worf said:
Don't know why, in this age of high-density solid-state storage, why a CVR can't record an entire flight.
Click to expand...

This is mere speculation on my part, but the 737 isn't exactly a new airplane in general, and not everyone has the budget to update all their planes with the "latest and greatest" gear.

Also, in most cases recording the whole flight is somewhat of overkill, as usually only the last part of the flight before the crash contains the abnormal condition(s) that caused the crash.
 
Death said:
This is mere speculation on my part, but the 737 isn't exactly a new airplane in general, and not everyone has the budget to update all their planes with the "latest and greatest" gear.
Click to expand...

While the 757 has been discontinued, and the 767 is down to one actively produced variant, there have been half a dozen brand new 737 variants developed and launched in the last decade. This was a 737-300, so it wasn't a new plane, but a memory card capable of holding 8 hours of audio costs like $35. Seems like it be a pretty simple and cheap upgrade.
 
That $35 is for a commercial, "off the shelf" card, used in a consumer reader/player. I'm pretty sure the FAA requires a lot of testing before it certifies parts like safety equipment as being airworthy, and I doubt other nations' equivalent of the FAA are much less concerned with safety, which adds to the unit cost. Of course, that unit cost is also multiplied by how many aircraft need the system, which can add up to a not-small amount of cash, particularly with fuel prices as they are and competition making it difficult to compensate with higher fares.
 
Death said:
That $35 is for a commercial, "off the shelf" card, used in a consumer reader/player. I'm pretty sure the FAA requires a lot of testing before it certifies parts like safety equipment as being airworthy, and I doubt other nations' equivalent of the FAA are much less concerned with safety, which adds to the unit cost. Of course, that unit cost is also multiplied by how many aircraft need the system, which can add up to a not-small amount of cash, particularly with fuel prices as they are and competition making it difficult to compensate with higher fares.
Click to expand...

Yeah, so even if it's ten times more expensive for a "industrial grade" memory card, we're still talking pennies in comparison to the price of a plane. Fuel and maintenance costs for each flight are tens of thousands of dollars. A one-time expense that's not more than a couple hundred bucks is peanuts. The reason is what was said earlier. Problems occur during the last 30 minutes, so you don't really need to record eight hours of voice, but it's a pretty insignificant expenditure if you wanted to.
 
Y'all are missing the point. The recording medium has to be crash-proof and especially fire-proof. The current flight recorder tapes are metal. That is the type technology necessary for a recording to survive the "smoking hole".

Preventive stuff, autopilot, navigation stuff, doesn't have to survive the crash.
 
All this arguing over the reliability of a CVR is funny. Really.

The problem with a CVR is that it's mechanical. And it's a 30-minute loop of tape that's re-recorded over and over and over again. The problem with this is that given the age of the CVRs (they remain in place in the aircraft at all times other than periodic servicing), the media can be quite degraded by the time it's needed.

Flight Data Recorders can record easily 128 or more channels of information for hours on end. Modern flight data recorders don't use tape anymore. They use a small 2" cube containing solid-state memory. It's well padded and protected, but solid-state memory is far more reliable, lighter, and survives crashes far easier. They can be made to record high-quality audio as well. Seems to favor a solid lump of plastic or ceramic encased in metal armor quite well. And it's quite easy to build in verification technology into the solid state media to detect when the media might begin to degrade.

Sure, getting a solid-state CVR certified will cost some money, but since a CVR and FDR will probably already cost $100K+ each, the media itself is a fairly low cost. And regular consumer solid state memory is already quite reliable - there have been cases where all that survived was the chip inside, yet the data was completely recoverable.

There have also been many instances where a 30-minute CVR is useless because the incident the caused it was more than 30 minutes prior to the CVR losing power. More tape isn't an answer (since it increases the chances of a jam, making things even worse than before), but there really has to be a solution.

Sure the vast majority of accidents have causes that can be identified by the last 30 minutes. But I'm sure the investigators would love to have the entire flight's worth, which might reveal other clues as to what happened as well. (E.g., if a warning signal comes on in the middle of a flight, then goes away - what the pilot thinks might have an impact, or just being able to track the FDR with the CVR).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top