theseissl.com

AF 447 - delayed

I’m now following the news about this desaster during the last days – and something bothers me more and more.

Since almost the first news about the missing flight AF447 we have been informed that the plane-system sent alert-mails / infos to the headquarter or service center of Air France via satellite. Within the last hours we learned much about the last minutes and the fight of the crew against a flood of alert messages they were confronted in their cockpit – but what me bothers more and more is: why did the alert message NOT contain any information about the current and / or last confirmed position of the plane so that the wreckage of the plane could be localized easier?

For me GPS infos should be part of such messages because they probably would be the last / only indicator about the position of the plane before it crashes. I’m not a flight technical – so maybe I’m wrong with this and there are reasons why the info is not included… or – the info is included and there is another different reason why the info does not got published.

For me as an IT specialist it is normal to include as many information about a malfunction of a system as possible. If the error occures I don’t have the possibilty to debug the system – so I would have to ensure that all relevant information is provided within the malfunction info – espacially the position (workflow step and condition) where the error occured. In case of a plane controlling system it has to be the GPS data in addition.

So far as I know GPS should have been available during flight – the system was ordered by Ronald Reagan after the shotdown of flight KAL 007 in 1983 to be freely available for civilian use…

Hopefully they find the wreckage as soon as possible to get the answers about what happened there in the sky.

The iPhone can assist you with the build in GPS tracker. Basically it’s used to find your current position and displayes it on the GoogleMaps app which is bundled with the iPhone.

Beside this app there are also some additional navigation tools available on the iTunes store – some are paid apps, some for free…

I was looking for an app which is tracking my paths in the background and shows me the data afterwards in a way that can be used with an external app on my MBP.
What I found was ‘Trails’ – a little app which syncs via mail, TrailRunner application hosted on my MBP over WiFi and a direct account at ‘EveryTrail’.

I played around a little bit with Trails – and I have to say that the export is really working perfect for me. So it was time to test the app on the road.

And well – that is the point here which is giving me a ‘no go’ for this app: I mentioned that the app is definitly not working on standby mode – so you always will have to run the application in the ‘open’ mode which shows up the following problems:
+ display is on – so the power is exhausting very, very fast
+ buttons are on duty –> sometimes you push them when you don’t want to

Other apps support ‘Button-locking’ and / or ‘Display dimming’ – which would solve both issues I found with this app…

Another big problem: incoming calls end the app –> no more waypoints are stored until you restart the app; you don’t have to answer the incoming call – it’s enough that the call is there… bad behavior

I tried to put the iPhone into standby when the app is still open – but (as mentioned above) it didn’t work.
In my opinion the app is not working for me because the power is running out too fast to use it on a longer trail.

What I will have to try in the next days is to test the app with a jailbroken iPhone which supports background tasks… we’ll see.

I know – there’s another app available: MotionX GPS (Lite). But this app does not support the export functionality I expect of such an application… Trails seems here really to be the better choice…