Question: The disappearance of Malaysia Airways Flight MH370 one year ago could have been solved if planes transmitted data from their flight data recorders (or “black boxes”) in real time. However, to implement such a safety measure would be very costly and time-consuming, and people ask whether the advantages of this outweigh the cost. Do you think that Civil Aviation authorities should do so? Why?

Pete Symons answered on 10 Mar 2015:

Great Question, you really could be an engineer asking questions like that!

Safety engineering is all about balancing the cost of doing something (whether that is time, money or trouble) with the benefit of the solution (in this case potentially saving multiple lives by quicker emergency response times). So the real crux of the question is ‘How many lives are we going to potentially save by doing this and how much is it going to cost?’

Before I get going it’s important to grasp that there is an acceptance of residual risk we all take, we know that flying in aircraft isn’t totally risk free but we do it so we can take the benefit and convenience of fast travel times to our holiday destinations, but to be totally glum (and I hope your not afraid of flying) but there is always a chance (albeit very small) the plane will crash, that is because you couldn’t possible design something that was totally risk free. The aircraft industry (as does every other industry) has ‘acceptable losses’ or accident rates, it’s currently about 0.3 deaths per every million flying hours for commercial airlines, so an ‘acceptable’ industry rate would equate to about 3 fatalities as a result of travelling on a commercial aircraft for every 10 million hours flown.

I think you also have to look at what currently exists in the form of systems on-board planes as well as the global Air Traffic Control procedures that exist to mitigate disasters such as MH370. We have multiple redundant systems to report location as well as multiple redundant radios which pilots can use (if they can). The Air traffic control system is well established and handover between controlled airspace and transfer using radar is well established and it works. So is that good enough? We don’t have many MH370 cases thank goodness but every now and then a very unlikely sequence of events occurs that is so unlikely that perhaps no-one thought was possible, but they do happen and we (as a society) accept that if they are very rare occurrence – victims families may have a different view of acceptability but you have to take a societal view otherwise you have too many bias’.

You could also say even if you did do real time recording for the MH370 case, how many lives would you have saved. An airline ditching on an ocean (presuming that’s where it ended up) has a very small chance of staying in one piece as its not a smooth surface like a runway, so any crash landing on an ocean is usually catastrophic. Yes it would have helped locate the aircraft but it’s doubtful it would have saved any lives.

So to summarise I don’t think the civilian aviation authorities should enforce the real time recording of data as I don’t think the benefit would outweigh the cost of implementing a solution (caveat-ed with the fact that I don’t know how much a solution would cost but or the sake of argument lets say £1,000,000,000,000 a year)

Phew.