o_1915f04bi181p2m9qs12em17oea.pdf

Culture & Society
A Black box los
Staff Writer
In relatively advanced countries
point your location from a simple
emergency 911 call.
When you travel outside Zimbabwe
to say South Africa or Britain and you
log on to your favourite internet based
application such as Facebook, Google or
use a Wi Fi in those countries, then almost
immediately your location is known.
We now live in the smartphone era;
many people now use these devices to
access the internet or to make phone calls.
These devices come with applications
that identify your location, so you can
never really get lost when using most
Android phones.
The question comes back again to
the missing Malaysian plane MH370.
How can it go missing with this entire
pinpointing technology? Can such a huge
plane just go missing without any traces
of its whereabouts?
A Boeing 777 plane is equipped with a
series of devices that allows the airliner
to keep tabs on the plane at all times.
In fact, it is also believed that Boeing,
the company that manufactures these
planes actually installs devices
unbeknown to
airliner operators. These devices allow
Boeing to have unfettered surveillance of
the plane even if something goes wrong
with the normal tracking devices.
It is interesting that Boeing has not
really come out to give its take or thoughts
on the disappeared plane and indeed
the former Prime Minister of Malaysia
Muhitair Mohamed, a critic of the West
pointed this out.
He claimed that Boeing had the
technology to remotely control a plane
once it was thought to have been
sabotaged and that this technology had
been in place since the 9/11 attacks.
For those in the IT world debate has
now shifted on trying to have a black box
in a different setting, a ‘black box in the
cloud’.
Black box in the cloud is the
technological response to the drama that
has characterized the missing MH370
plane. A Canadian airliner, First Air will
soon become one of the few operators that
will have this option to live stream black
box data in the event of an emergency.
FLYHTStream was made, a Calgary
based company FLYHT Aerospace
Solutions and it allows safety experts to
cockpit audio recorder in the event of an
emergency.
During an aircraft safety breach,
the Automated Flight
Information Reporting System (AFIRS)
retrieves back live 20 seconds of black
box data from the point at which the
breach began and immediately streams to
a secure server.
The pilot can activate FLYHTStream
inside the cockpit while the FLYHTStream
software can also be pre- programmed to
automatically switch on during an aircraft
responder did see it go off its course, the
procedure would be to activate the Flight
Stream.
This then allows the contact crew to
see what is going on and perhaps this
answers to families of those that were on
At a recent air show held in the UK,
aviation safety and security experts
called for the compulsory black box
data management backup systems in an
international digital age of aviation.
Such aviation backup systems will
enmesh ‘the cloud’, big data, wireless and
social media based communications.
shown the world that the black box alone
may not be enough anymore.
Since governments have failed to give
real answers or clues, the MH370 story
will remain a mystery and unfortunately
in the end conspiracy theories about what
happened will eventually become the
accepted theory.
A black box in the cloud seems like a
good shot at preventing another MH370
from ever happening again. It remains to
be seen if the rest of the world’s airliners
will adopt this technological innovation.
TP
Page 60 The Parade - Zimbabwe’s Most Read Lifestyle Magazine
August 2014