All this is true, but perhaps we should also be exploiting cheap and redundant systems that leverage more up-to-date technology, eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd find in a typical satellite smartphone, and a small parachute - something you could build with a unit cost under $5k, which you could easily make back without a drastic impact on ticket prices. If you deployed, say, 20 of them automatically during a catastrophe, odds are that a few of them would survive.
I'm not disputing anything you wrote above, but right now all our eggs are in two very expensive baskets (FDR/CVR). When a plane goes mssing you want to pinpoint the location of the crash ASAP and get some telemetry as a second priority. The existing systems are great but could we not also benefit from some cheaper and simpler systems that didn't rely on being bulletproof?
> "eg multiple lightweight pods that are designed to eject automatically under certain circumstances and consist of a battery, the same sort of technology you'd find in a typical satellite smartphone, and a small parachute"
So you've replaced a single point of failure (failure of the recording device) with 4: failure of the ejection trigger, failure of the ejection mechanism, failure of the parachute, and failure of the (significantly weaker) recording device.
The point of a black box is that it's an when all else has failed device - there are extremely few assumptions you can make about such a situation, so the correct move is to design as conservatively as possible. The plane could be gliding. It could be a raging fireball. It could be missing a wing. It could be about to crash but all the sensors still think everything is just great.
No. I want to keep the existing systems and add another system that's sufficiently cheap that it it can have a 95% failure rate and still be economical.
I mean, here we are after 3 days and none of the surface vessels can find the possibly-debris stuff seen from the air earlier today. I don't have a design for a foolproof system and am under no illusions that the existing 'black boxes' could be easily replaced, but the existence of commodity-cheap sensors, processing, and communications technology mean we can afford massive redundancy.
Don't be dense. That's not what at all he said & your math is all wrong.
The existing black box is not a single point of failure. The big question is finding it ... that's what this whole concern has been over (and, since you missed it, why I joshingly call you dense).
Anig also clearly stated that there would be 20 of these, operating in parallel. Your math is wrong because you ignore his central argument.
I'm not disputing anything you wrote above, but right now all our eggs are in two very expensive baskets (FDR/CVR). When a plane goes mssing you want to pinpoint the location of the crash ASAP and get some telemetry as a second priority. The existing systems are great but could we not also benefit from some cheaper and simpler systems that didn't rely on being bulletproof?