On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 00:52:28 +0200, "Ian Forbes"
wrote:

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 13:00:36 +0000, CH wrote:

And why Ian is it, that suddenly the Cambridge 25 Model should not be
save enough anymore. Was the safety standard proposed by the IGC not
good enough - too lax?

The politics of flight recorders seems to be as complicated as some of
their technical aspects. Clearly there is a lot of mistrust surrounding
the motivation of the decisions of the "GNSS Flight Recorder Approval
Committee" (GFAC) both now and in years gone by. Perhaps the technical
issues should be separated from the political ones.

If the GFAC defined a series of "levels of security" for GNSS Flight
Recorders. For example:

Level 610: Encryption, microswitch, ENL, internal GPS, barometric hight

Level 600: Encryption, microswitch, no ENL, internal GPS, barometric hight

Level 510: ENL, internal GPS, barometric hight

Level 500: Internal GPS, barometric hight

Level 400: External GPS, barometric hight

Level 300: Commercial GPS with logging function

Level 200: GPS + PDA + Software
Security depends on people and procedures, not hardware.

Any logger could be approved for anything with the right security
procedures in place. There is an approval condition for each logger
anyway and it simply needs to spell out the O.O. procedures required
for that logger.

GFAC's task would then be limited to examining the design features of
each logger and specifying the security procedures. They could be less
onerous for less prestigous events.

Better still just have a set of design feature rules that
manufacturers would design to for a particular level of O.O. procedure
and cut GFAC out of any approval loop. It only leads to suspicions of
corruption.

Mike Borgelt