• squaresinger@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Tbh, it’s such a simple and cheap device, why would you not have it?

    I’m frankly rather surprised that airplanes don’t have more of them (for redundancy). They might have been complicated tech in the 70s, but today it’s a non-issue.

    • don@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      More black boxes mean more money, something air line corporations really don’t like paying.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        What I mean is that black boxes are technically super easy today and shouldn’t cost a lot of money.

        All you need is basically a microcontroller writing to an SSD in an armored, heat-shielded box. Should be cheaper than a single seat.

        I couldn’t find up-to-date prices. The only thing I could find was that in 1993 a combined cockpit voice and data recoder that was made in a way that it would detach from the plane in case of ditching in water would cost ~$60k per piece.

        That was in a time way before shock resistant SSDs, so it was mechanically much more difficult to build that.

        Can’t imagine that a modern airplane grade black box costs more than a couple thousand.

        When it comes to cars, all you need is a microcontroller logging to an SD card or EMMC. That costs maybe a few dollars.