SSS 2011-09-14

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 The little black boxes in airplanes provide useful information after a crash has taken place. Now researchers have devised a way to use black box info from planes that do not crash to help prevent accidents from ever happening. Some airlines already used a program that checks 88 flight parameters¹ in the black box. But Boeing 747 can record 2,000 flight parameters. So the researchers employed what's called cluster analysis. They took data from 365 flights of Boeing 777s in a month of operations of now defunct² European airline. They filtered the data into clusters, groupings of flights with similar patterns. Any date points outside of normal operations appear as an anomaly. The information generated identified three problematic flights, in one for instance, the data showed the pilot had trouble rotating the plane during take-off. The system can identify anomalies that suggested both physical and operational issues such as those that caused a wrong # accident in Chicago in December, 2005. The researchers from MIT and Spain will present their paper in October at the 30th digital avionics systems conference in Seattle because to prevent future accidents, you might have to think inside the box.

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