By Berry Block,
Re: Searchers detect signal resembling ‘black box,' April 6
Searchers detect signal resembling ‘black box,' April 6
In 1969, mankind landed a man on the moon and the world was able to hear Neil Armstrong’s iconic words from a distance of approximately 385,000 kilometres.
It is astounding and inconceivable that 45 years later, and with the incredible technological advances made since then, manufacturers of the black boxes fitted into commercial aircraft have not been able to design a flight data recorder that has more than 30 days of battery life or one that has a longer range when immersed of, say, more than six kilometres in a straight line.
The average depth of the Indian Ocean is about four kilometres and the current search areas are about 1,500 kilometres from land. One would think that a submerged black box with a range of at least 3,000 kilometres to stream data in any direction and a battery life of at least a year would have been constructed a long time ago.
There are hundreds of communication satellites above Earth and yet the technology to conquer the depth of the oceans insofar as flight data recorders are concerned is still sorely lacking, and obviously and urgently has to be conquered.
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