Black box flight recorders didn't save my life directly, but I'm sure that with the number of flights I've taken in my life, my chances of dying are much lower now thanks to improved airline safety. Those improvements are a result of the investigations helped by the black box flight recorder.
So it's saved my life as much as an airbag: not directly from personal experience, but by saving the source of information about a crash and improving overall safety as a result.
Yeah, from the title, it would have to be an invention that has saved the life of virtually everyone on earth. Perhaps something that prevented a nuclear apocalypse or the like.
Or, at the very least, something that's saved the life of virtually every person likely to read BBC news. ;)
As it turns out, it's the "black box" flight recorder. A great invention to be sure, but hardly of the scale just described.
The inventor's name was David Warren. The invention was the flight recorder. Perhaps the title could convey this information, making it more informative on its own.
I hope their analytics will indicate "people leave as soon as they get to the paragraph where it starts implying he invented the flight recorder" as well.
BBC news has gone slowly but steadily downhill over the past decade - the dumbing down, FUD and clickbait headlines are perhaps the final steps in it's slow march to becoming tabloid news.
Agreed. It's an interesting story, but the title is pure clickbait.
The story itself also fails at inverted pyramid, which is something you'd expect from a piece under "News/Australia" on the site, but I guess they just put in in the wrong place, and inverted pyramid itself is a concept that became forgotten in an ad-supported journalism era.
In case others are curious about what “inverted pyramid” means:
The writer prioritizes the factual information to be conveyed in the news story by importance. The most essential pieces of information are offered in the first line, which is called the lead (or summary lead).
David Warren's contribution was in 1953. The first modern flight data recorder, called "Mata Hari", was created in 1942 by Finnish aviation engineer Veijo Hietala. During World War II both British and American air forces successfully experimented with aircraft voice recorders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder
Professor James J. "Crash" Ryan's '"Flight Recorder" patent was filed in August 1953 a device he invented in response to a 1948 request from the Civil Aeronautics Board aimed at establishing operating procedures to reduce air mishaps.
> The pilots' union responded with fury, branding the recorder a snooping device, and insisted "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening"
interesting I never thought this from the pilots perspective.
Yeah, I suppose they thought that the recordings would used primarily to assign blame to pilots, but I don't think this has been the case. Even when the cause of a crash is assigned to "pilot error", there is a general recognition that it is a failure of the whole system and that the plane often didn't give (or gave misleading) information to the pilots.
I think one way of assuaging these types of concerns in ensuring that the contents are not externally accessible.
I've heard similar privacy rumblings about putting 'dashcams' in cockpits, but as long as they're not streaming and only accessible either (a) in post-crash debris, or (b) some kind of NTSB 'warrant' for near-misses, I think that may lessen concerns.
anecdotally: i have heard that new equipment that gets installed in or near the driver's compartment in trains needs to be built to be extremely rugged. Some drivers are suspicious that new equipment is to let management spy on them or automate away part of their jobs, and will endeavour to render it non-functional.
I've advocated that the CVR record cockpit video, too. Lots of crash investigations have difficulty answering questions like what was the pilot looking at, what was he doing, what the instruments were saying, what were the switch positions, what was visible out the windows, even who was in the seat.
It's a good reminder of the bubble the average HN reader is likely in - including me, and apparently this BBC writer - that something like 80% of people have never flown.
In the UK, we're on a tiny little island. If we want to go anywhere interesting, we generally have to fly. Also it's often significantly cheaper than trains to continental Europe.
I understand a some can't afford to, I don't believe "most people" can't afford to. The other commenter said 25% of Brits haven't flown (according to the Telegraph).
Given you can get half way across the world without flying the total number of people who haven't left these isles should be a bit lower.
Fair enough, I wasn't clear; but my point is that sho's number was probably about the whole world, so it doesn't make much sense to make an UK-specific reply.
Africa is difficult, because it's a continent, and there is a lot of variety, but India and China, I'd imagine extremely high, like the 80% figure mentioned, or more.
Maybe a bit of “grass is greener” here, but I think you have plenty interesting on your tiny island - from incredibly picturesque natural landscapes to one of the top 5 most important cities in the world, and everything in between.
There are ferries to the isles and Ireland, yes. there is the "Euro Star" train which can be boarded with vehicles to take you to continental Europe, it stops in cities like Paris, Brussels, etc, and you could probably catch something that floats too.
"we're on a tiny little island. If we want to go anywhere interesting"
Why is that more true of the UK than anywhere else? We're connected to the continent via train so can in principle get to anywhere interesting that way. Plus the UK is fairly compact and interesting in its own right, it isn't exactly mile after mile of uninhabited wasteland.
It was mostly a joke, but, there is some validity in that we are surrounded by water.
If you want to go from say, Montreaux (Switzerland) to Evian (France) or Aosta (Italy) you can hop it your car and drive there in very little time. It's not _quite_ that easy from here.
I saw an infographic recently, that compared islands by size, can't remember where, but it was interesting to see the relative sizes of islands one assumes to be much larger/smaller than they are!
I first realized this in Manila, when a 50-something cab driver to the airport was enthusiastically asking me if I was excited to see snow in Korea (my next destination).
He had never left the Philippines and therefore had never experienced winter weather in his life.
I suppose it should have been obvious in hindsight that international travel would be a huge expense for a cab driver in a developing country, but I never really considered it before then.
Copies of the crystal radio, not copies of the audio stream. Unless he also managed to invent a tape recorder, duplicator and playback device, then sell the latter to his friends so that he could sell them the recordings...
Hospitals should record audio and video to systematically reduce accidents and infections, the way that data recorders have systematically reduced aircraft accidents.
A few years ago I was severely immunocompromised and treated in an isolated hospital room. Too frequently a doctor or nurse would forget to wash their hands before touching me or my IV line, or would then pick up a pen they had dropped on the floor, or would touch their beeper, or would sneeze into their hands, or some other lapse in hygene. One time an unusual situation and distracted nurse led to my IV line having a large amount of air in the line, which would have been pumped into my bloodstream if I hadn't stopped the machine.
Of course, the patient would need to be convinced that it was worth the loss of privacy. And the nurses would need to be convinced that individual nurses would not be blamed.
> And the nurses would need to be convinced that individual nurses would not be blamed.
Not using that information to assign blame is crucial. It must only be used to evaluate changes in procedures and equipment that will improve outcomes.
Legislation that guarantees that such recordings are inadmissible in court would help a lot.
Are you aware of how ridiculous some hygenic laws in hospitals are? Basically if you would follow the rules, your hands would be festering, open wounds within a week.
This unrealistic, human nature blind, algorithmic thinking which grinded the rules "ignoreable" in the first place, is what you need to solve.
The result may look stupid (japanes train conductor hand signs), and may even feel counterintuitive (UVW-Colour on all the doorhandles) and it might also need to acknowledge that some "basic equipment" - like rubbergloves, are for the wearer a health hazard.
Sorry if someone weights his own health higher then yours during his/her working hours. No surveilance in the world will encourage people to ruin there hands.
A 1950s colonial mindset which said nothing good could come out of this country, and everything good would get invented in either the UK, or Germany or America.
As an Australian who left the country owing to a perceived lack of R&D opportunities far later on, in 2001, and had never heard this sentiment articulated, I found this quote very interesting. It is a shame that, even to date, stories behind the many Australian inventions are not taught in Australian schools. We are responsible for so many interesting things: wifi, samba, rsync, Wikileaks, TCP half-open scanning, rubber hose cryptography, plastic money, wave-piercing multihulls, power boards, ultrasound, pacemakers, feature-length film, photolithography, refrigeration, permaculture, plain tobacco packaging, swim briefs, medical penicillin, bionic ears, electric drills, winged keels, plastic lenses, inflatable emergency rafts, New Zealand, etc.
Perhaps the Australian government is to blame: having been outside for so long, looking in, it seems they (especially one of the two major parties) consistently de-fund, de-nature and over-regulate the educational and cultural sectors of society while failing to provide viable avenues for R&D to retain talent in the country. Their biggest 'program' seems to be reducing tax on large-scale R&D expenses ... perhaps not realising that the very nature of Australia's economy makes it a terrible place (~zero supply chain, very high costs, very small market, no VC, miles from anywhere, timezone unique in the English speaking world) to perform most R&D.
I just went to a funeral in the USA. It seems so Aussie to glue jokes to the coffin and it feels like that would never happen here (I'm an Aussie so perhaps biased).
61 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadSo it's saved my life as much as an airbag: not directly from personal experience, but by saving the source of information about a crash and improving overall safety as a result.
Or, at the very least, something that's saved the life of virtually every person likely to read BBC news. ;)
As it turns out, it's the "black box" flight recorder. A great invention to be sure, but hardly of the scale just described.
The story itself also fails at inverted pyramid, which is something you'd expect from a piece under "News/Australia" on the site, but I guess they just put in in the wrong place, and inverted pyramid itself is a concept that became forgotten in an ad-supported journalism era.
The writer prioritizes the factual information to be conveyed in the news story by importance. The most essential pieces of information are offered in the first line, which is called the lead (or summary lead).
https://www.thoughtco.com/inverted-pyramid-composition-16910...
Theres also a different intended use.
You always get issues like this with 'firsts', theres very little new under the sun, so the lines are always going to be arbitrary.
As I said, you always get this with 'firsts'.
interesting I never thought this from the pilots perspective.
I've heard similar privacy rumblings about putting 'dashcams' in cockpits, but as long as they're not streaming and only accessible either (a) in post-crash debris, or (b) some kind of NTSB 'warrant' for near-misses, I think that may lessen concerns.
The objections were the same.
Given you can get half way across the world without flying the total number of people who haven't left these isles should be a bit lower.
I agree that world-wide "most" is likely correct.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/a-quarter-of-britons...
It's not a terrible figure.
Why is that more true of the UK than anywhere else? We're connected to the continent via train so can in principle get to anywhere interesting that way. Plus the UK is fairly compact and interesting in its own right, it isn't exactly mile after mile of uninhabited wasteland.
If you want to go from say, Montreaux (Switzerland) to Evian (France) or Aosta (Italy) you can hop it your car and drive there in very little time. It's not _quite_ that easy from here.
He had never left the Philippines and therefore had never experienced winter weather in his life.
I suppose it should have been obvious in hindsight that international travel would be a huge expense for a cab driver in a developing country, but I never really considered it before then.
In reality, if planes were less safe, fewer people would ride them, which would probably end up killing less (due to lower pollution).
>"But unfortunately we didn't prang - we just landed safely…"
Priceless.
Looks to me that he was one of the first audio pirates as well...
Well the point of the article is that he kind of did....
A few years ago I was severely immunocompromised and treated in an isolated hospital room. Too frequently a doctor or nurse would forget to wash their hands before touching me or my IV line, or would then pick up a pen they had dropped on the floor, or would touch their beeper, or would sneeze into their hands, or some other lapse in hygene. One time an unusual situation and distracted nurse led to my IV line having a large amount of air in the line, which would have been pumped into my bloodstream if I hadn't stopped the machine.
Of course, the patient would need to be convinced that it was worth the loss of privacy. And the nurses would need to be convinced that individual nurses would not be blamed.
Not using that information to assign blame is crucial. It must only be used to evaluate changes in procedures and equipment that will improve outcomes.
Legislation that guarantees that such recordings are inadmissible in court would help a lot.
This unrealistic, human nature blind, algorithmic thinking which grinded the rules "ignoreable" in the first place, is what you need to solve.
The result may look stupid (japanes train conductor hand signs), and may even feel counterintuitive (UVW-Colour on all the doorhandles) and it might also need to acknowledge that some "basic equipment" - like rubbergloves, are for the wearer a health hazard.
https://www.dermnetnz.org/topics/occupational-skin-disease/
Sorry if someone weights his own health higher then yours during his/her working hours. No surveilance in the world will encourage people to ruin there hands.
As an Australian who left the country owing to a perceived lack of R&D opportunities far later on, in 2001, and had never heard this sentiment articulated, I found this quote very interesting. It is a shame that, even to date, stories behind the many Australian inventions are not taught in Australian schools. We are responsible for so many interesting things: wifi, samba, rsync, Wikileaks, TCP half-open scanning, rubber hose cryptography, plastic money, wave-piercing multihulls, power boards, ultrasound, pacemakers, feature-length film, photolithography, refrigeration, permaculture, plain tobacco packaging, swim briefs, medical penicillin, bionic ears, electric drills, winged keels, plastic lenses, inflatable emergency rafts, New Zealand, etc.
Perhaps the Australian government is to blame: having been outside for so long, looking in, it seems they (especially one of the two major parties) consistently de-fund, de-nature and over-regulate the educational and cultural sectors of society while failing to provide viable avenues for R&D to retain talent in the country. Their biggest 'program' seems to be reducing tax on large-scale R&D expenses ... perhaps not realising that the very nature of Australia's economy makes it a terrible place (~zero supply chain, very high costs, very small market, no VC, miles from anywhere, timezone unique in the English speaking world) to perform most R&D.