On June 4, 2009 the Los Angeles Times took a section of a letter that I sent to them and put this in their LETTERS section:
“There is no technical reason why digital flight recorder data are not sent in real-time to the ground. We have the technology to do this. Then, within a couple of seconds, we would have a plane’s position, altitude and velocity safely stored on the ground. This information could be used for flight safety, aviation security and cost reduction. We don’t know what went wrong on Flight 447, but we would sure know where the plane went down, why it went down and possibly could have saved lives.” Getting to the crash site early may save lives, getting the DFDR can prevent recurring fatal crashes. It’s not just position that’s needed it’s all of the data sent to the recorder that is critical to ascertaining the root cause of a crash and should be available to prevent some of the crashes from occurring.
Billions of dollars are wasted each year on unnecessary airport runway expansion programs to reduce fatal ground incursions. These incursions wouldn’t occur if the flight data was shared so pilots and air traffic control had better visibility. But because the digital data isn’t shared automatically the pilot sees only a fraction of the information necessary to prevent a crash and the same hold for the air traffic controllers. Crashes such as Tenerife, Comair, etc. are directly caused by the lack of visibility due to not sharing the DFDR data in real-time. Thus, the real-time use of the DFDR data to prevent crashes is more important then its present autopsy mode of operation.
The real-time use of the data recorders will save a substantial amount of lives, make our country safer and reduce the cost of flying. Telemetering the flight data to the ground in real-time would assure that we have the data - in many crashes the flight data isn't recovered (e.g. 9/11, et al) or has errors in it since no one is looking at it, or using it in real-time to find malfunctions. Yet, this valuable digital flight recorder data (DFDR) data has been left to the autopsy mode for post mortem simulations and not utilized proactively in real-time to save lives.
This, Air France flight 447, is another example of horrific crashes that possibly could have been prevented and saved lives. We surely would be able to use the flight data to prevent recurring crashes of this type and to minimize the anguish of the passengers families and the cost and time of trying to recover the recorders. The aviation industry has always attempted to minimize their liability. They fought against flight recorders and lost. Now they are fighting to keep the information going to the flight recorders industry private even if that jeopardized national security and been responsible for countless aviation fatalities. Their lobby is so strong that they have put a Titanic (Warsaw) clause into all fights over international waters. This Titanic clause limits a family member of a passenger that is killed in a flight to a small fraction of the persons earning capacity even if the industry is found at fault. This has been printed in fine print on the back of every ticket. They were not successful in getting this egregious law over land since people were watching and protested. Thus, by their own action they don’t care first for the passengers and second for their industry. The only way to change this and to make passenger safety and national security come first is if the public demands that the flight recorder data be available in real-time to be used to prevent crashes from initially occurring (real-time use of the recorder data) as well as recurring crashes (autopsy mode post flight recorder analysis) and that the flight data isn’t the private property of the airline industry to suppress out of fear of litigation.
Sy Levine
sylevine1@sbcglobal.net
levines@wlac.edu
http://www.safelander.com
Remote Aircraft Flight Recorder and Advisory System (RAFT) patent #5,890,079, 3/30/1999
Posted June 23rd, 2009 by Anonymous
