Communicating aircraft structure for solving black-box loss on ocean crash.

Summary Commercial aircrafts use black-box required for crash investigation purposes. While a black-box can be easily recovered in crash events on land, the same does not apply to crash events in great deep ocean water. This paper presents a new solution towards solving black-box data loss on ocean crash using a paradigm called communicating materials. The solution is developed through uniformly integrating hundreds of micro sensors nodes in the aircraft structure. The nodes could then construct a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) inside the aircraft. When a crash is detected by the aircraft system, the black-box data could be stored in all nodes using data storage protocols for WSN. Since nodes are uniformly deployed in the whole aircraft structure, investigators could thus gather preliminary crash causes information from the nodes inside any floated aircraft wreckage in the ocean. This solution was evaluated using Castalia simulator in terms of reliability, storage capacity, and energy efficiency.