Being hit by a truck, then catching fire and being allowed to burn while doused in jet fuel for a while before being dunked in seawater for a few days.
The flight recorder itself doesn’t do that either. Just the case surrounding it. You could just as well put an SSD in it. Hell it would probably be better as older tech was more vulnerable to vibrations.
Of-the-shelf SSDs are optimized for speed and price.
Flight recorders are typically specified to withstand an impact of 3400 g and temperatures of over 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), exposure to salt water, and high pressure if it sinks to the bottom of the sea as required by EUROCAE ED-112.
Maybe you could design a flight recorder that uses SSDs, but then you must get it certified again for the new hardware, which will cost a lot of money nobody wants to spend.
The next step in flight recorders is to also send a live feed of telemetric data back to some ground station so the last position of the plane is known - with a flight recorder you only get this data after you found the wreck. Currently submitting this signal is optional and can be turned of by the pilot, which is the reason why Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing.
Yes, in the EU the minimum recording time was recently increased to 25h.
It is not a tech limitation anymore.
What is actually limiting are privacy concerns from misuse of the longer recording.
What kind of privacy data would be on a black box recorder? Just banter between flight crew? They are in a work environment so the recorded conversations should be kept professional anyway, IMO.
Is it really a matter of how easy it is or how much it would cost to change it? I’m also talking about making a nicer/better version so I really don’t understand your can’t have nice things statement.
So what problems would a modern SSD not be better at?
Being hit by a truck, then catching fire and being allowed to burn while doused in jet fuel for a while before being dunked in seawater for a few days.
I’ll bet you can’t find an SSD which can do that.
The flight recorder itself doesn’t do that either. Just the case surrounding it. You could just as well put an SSD in it. Hell it would probably be better as older tech was more vulnerable to vibrations.
Which is why it’s in the protective box?
Of-the-shelf SSDs are optimized for speed and price.
Flight recorders are typically specified to withstand an impact of 3400 g and temperatures of over 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), exposure to salt water, and high pressure if it sinks to the bottom of the sea as required by EUROCAE ED-112.
Maybe you could design a flight recorder that uses SSDs, but then you must get it certified again for the new hardware, which will cost a lot of money nobody wants to spend. The next step in flight recorders is to also send a live feed of telemetric data back to some ground station so the last position of the plane is known - with a flight recorder you only get this data after you found the wreck. Currently submitting this signal is optional and can be turned of by the pilot, which is the reason why Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing.
Maybe? Really?
I think this is probably more of the answer. Capitalism 101.
Black box were Solid State Drive before SSD were common, the advantages of no moving parts are simply too high.
Then it should be easy to add in a larger capacity modern drive?
Yes, in the EU the minimum recording time was recently increased to 25h. It is not a tech limitation anymore. What is actually limiting are privacy concerns from misuse of the longer recording.
What kind of privacy data would be on a black box recorder? Just banter between flight crew? They are in a work environment so the recorded conversations should be kept professional anyway, IMO.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
“I don’t understand the problem, therefore it must be simple and anyone not saying it’s simple is obviously wrong”
Is it really a matter of how easy it is or how much it would cost to change it? I’m also talking about making a nicer/better version so I really don’t understand your can’t have nice things statement.