Super Happy Unfun Thread!

How is it an insult when it's my considered opinion, based on facts?

I think it can't get more unfun than this in Canada:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/man-committing-random-acts-of-kindness-by-giving-out-cash--detained-in-mental-hospital-225126586.html

How is it an insult when it's my considered opinion, based on facts?



Facts ,huh, so you have met all the meat eaters in the world and they all act the same ?


Twilight Zone Opening THEME MUSIC 1962 Rod Serling - YouTube

I really didn't know where to put this:

China ship hears 'signal'; unclear if jet-related (http://news.yahoo.com/china-ship-hears-signal-unclear-153240778.html)

I hope they look at simple (not huge re-vamps) fixes to help in these instances. For example my phone has an app that sends a gps "flare" if the battery dies. That way I could go to the web and at least have an idea of where it was the last time it was on. I would think that a simple GPS flare idea would be something doable for planes. In cases of sudden loss of altitude, or if at time of landing/crashing if the GPS doesn't match the destination coordinates, it shoots off a GPS flare.

Just something "simple"

they turned their avionics off, whoever had ground radar coverage wasn't immediately forthcoming.

planes have an underwater beacon that sends out a low frequency signal (cause water) once it goes below sea level. battery lasts 20-30 days, depending on how good they are at replacing the batteries, and only works up to 20,000 feet. can only be detected a few miles away (cause water).

gps is a one way signal, in order to send a flare, it'd have to do it over a radio or radio-enabled device (iff mode s, etc), which again, they turned off.

also if they were that far out into the ocean, HF radio is they only thing that'd have enough range, which generally are only used in heavy military aircraft, as the system requires long wire antennas and 90 pounds of equipment.

vhf/uhf radios caps at about 200-300 miles, and i don't think most commercial airlines are installing satcom systems.

they turned their avionics off, whoever had ground radar coverage wasn't immediately forthcoming.

planes have an underwater beacon that sends out a low frequency signal (cause water) once it goes below sea level. battery lasts 20-30 days, depending on how good they are at replacing the batteries, and only works up to 20,000 feet. can only be detected a few miles away (cause water).

gps is a one way signal, in order to send a flare, it'd have to do it over a radio or radio-enabled device (iff mode s, etc), which again, they turned off.

also if they were that far out into the ocean, HF radio is they only thing that'd have enough range, which generally are only used in heavy military aircraft, as the system requires long wire antennas and 90 pounds of equipment.

vhf/uhf radios caps at about 200-300 miles, and i don't think most commercial airlines are installing satcom systems.

Ok, and I am not sure what a "simple" solution is, and I doubt we find one here.
Are you saying that GPS "flare" couldn't have a check and override to turn on a simple GPS system. It seems like it could be an isolated android device (ie cellphone/tablet) that wakes / connects when main power turns off, not something tied into to the avionics cluster.

gps is a passive system. the flare your phone sends is over 3g/4g/etc. it's using a radio.

in aircraft you can pull breakers to disable a system completely. no uhf radio = no way to send the signal. over 300miles from a ground station = no one would hear it. a phone doesn't have the range of a 16 watt uhf transceiver, and would require a working cell tower in range (also short ranged), AND cell towers emit a corkscrew pattern signal (they take the omnidirectional power and shift it so the power/signal that'd be transmitted up into the air or into the ground instead increases the power of the horizontal signal, where it's more useful).

there is radio networking and satcom, but i don't think most commercial planes bother with it. the engine check was sending a satellite message, for example (but it was very very short with very very little info other than engine good/engine bad).

again, we're talking about a plane lost at sea, not within range of ground radar, cell networks, tacan, etc etc.

gps is a passive system. the flare your phone sends is over 3g/4g/etc. it's using a radio.

in aircraft you can pull breakers to disable a system completely. no uhf radio = no way to send the signal. over 300miles from a ground station = no one would hear it. a phone doesn't have the range of a 16 watt uhf transceiver, and would require a working cell tower in range (also short ranged), AND cell towers emit a corkscrew pattern signal (they take the omnidirectional power and shift it so the power/signal that'd be transmitted up into the air or into the ground instead increases the power of the horizontal signal, where it's more useful).

there is radio networking and satcom, but i don't think most commercial planes bother with it. the engine check was sending a satellite message, for example (but it was very very short with very very little info other than engine good/engine bad).

again, we're talking about a plane lost at sea, not within range of ground radar, cell networks, tacan, etc etc.

Thanks for the explanation. What would you think of planes streaming their telemetry to a backend(cloud) recorder, as a sister system to the local blackbox? And having a portion of the avionics as an always on system to maintain that. I know in this case you would still have to rely on the blackbox for the duration of the flight that they were out of ground station range, but wouldn't that have given the search teams a better idea early on?

again, if you want to pass info outside of line of sight, you need either a heavy HF radio or a satcom system, both add weight (= more fuel consumed = higher operating cost) and expense. then you need to buy time and storage from someone who owns a satellite cluster. and then you have maintenance costs of installing / repairing / checking / upgrading / integrating another system which needs at least 3-4 boxes and an antenna.

so the short answer, is yeah it's possible, but it's not cheap, and out of the millions and millions of flights, it'd only prove useful on maybe 1 per year. most flight don't abort their flight paths and shut down all communication. if this guy stayed on his flight path, the search would have ended in the first week. if he had comms up, he could had radio'd on the guard frequencies and everyone within range would have heard him automatically.

if they can recover the CVR they might get the last 30 minutes of cockpit audio, but salt water and impact effects have a way of destroying things.

also, on on airplane, the only things that are "always on" are things on battery. everything else draws power from the airplanes generator (which is powered by the engines), so you can cut the flow of electricity through the breaker panels to basically everything, cause you can't work on fixing a system with the power on, and you can't have something going haywire that you can't shut off.

anyways, very few things are on battery, the blackbox stuff, the gps (to hold almanac info while the plane is off) and a couple other things.