Latest news with #Esser
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Yahoo
Officers engage residents at Peoria Walk and Talk
PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — The Peoria Police Department held its second Walk and Talk event along Arcadia Avenue just off of Wisconsin Avenue on Wednesday Members of the Peoria Police Department use Walk and Talks as a tool to build trust within the community. Officers spent time knocking on doors, leaving pamphlets in mailboxes or in the hands of residents. People shared their concerns and suggestions, including wanting the officers to be more visible. Interim Patrol Captain Eric Esser said the Walk and Talks are beneficial to the community and police department. 'I know that it has helped us solve a couple of crimes in the past,' Esser said. 'The information that we received from some people. And it also just gets us out there engaging with the people that we're serving. So, I think that's pretty big, it's a big goal of our department, and I enjoy it and I think the officers enjoy it too.' Walk and Talks are hosted every other Wednesday until August 27. There are a total of 10 this year. The next Walk and Talk will start near Whittier Primary School on May 21. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
What do black boxes on planes actually record?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. In the mid-1950s, while investigating a series of mysterious crashes of the de Havilland Comet — the world's first commercial jet airliner — David Warren thought of a solution that would assist with all future airline investigations: a flight recorder. The idea was to have a record of the flight condition, such as the speed and altitude, and a tape that captured the pilot's reaction moments before an accident. Warren, then a 28-year-old scientist at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory in Melbourne, Australia, believed this tool should be placed in every aircraft. Although the idea didn't take off instantly, his innovation would later become a major milestone in the safety of modern aircraft. Since then, black boxes have aided in numerous aircraft accident investigations, including for commercial planes and helicopters. But what information do black boxes record? First, let's start with a primer on what a black box actually is. Flight recorders come with two separate components: a data recorder and a voice recorder. "The data recorder can oftentimes tell you what happened, but the voice recorders can tell you why it happened," David Esser, an aeronautical scientist at the Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, told Live Science. Related: Can a commercial airplane do a barrel roll? The flight data recorder is located at the tail of the aircraft — an area that is most likely to survive a crash. But the voice recorder is placed inside the cockpit to record the pilots' conversation and other sounds that may hint at what went wrong moments before an accident. These recorders are each equipped with beacons that send acoustic signals to make them easier to find during an overwater accident. Their appearance also makes them easier to locate. Despite their nickname, flight recorders are not actually black boxes. "They're orange — on purpose, so that they stand out clearly in a crash scene," Esser said. The term "black box" was likely borrowed from the field of computing, in which a system has an input and output with an internal mechanism that is often not widely understood by a layperson, Esser said. These recorders are built to withstand extreme conditions such as high impact, fire and deep-sea pressure, said Abdalla Elazaly, an advanced system engineer at Honeywell, which supplies these recorders to aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing and Airbus. "Engineers use robust materials like titanium or stainless steel for the casing," Elazaly told Live Science in an email. However, certain situations could lead the systems to fail. Such scenarios include a total loss of power in the airplane, prolonged exposure to fire or a deep water environment, and high-speed crashes, he said. Some data recorders can retain at least 88 parameters of a flight operation, including the time, altitude and airspeed continuously for 25 hours, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). In addition, they record more than 1,000 data points inside the aircraft that could help with investigations. For example, it records if and when the smoke alarm was triggered, the airplane flap positions, and when it engaged in autopilot. On the other hand, the cockpit voice recorder picks up sounds such as engine noise, landing gear movements, flicks of the switches, and other alerts inside the cockpit. The recorder is usually connected to an overhead microphone that sits between the two pilots. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires commercial aircraft to have voice recorders with at least 25 hours of nonstop recording capacity. In the event of an aircraft accident, the flight recorders provide key information that can determine the cause of an accident. Only members of the accident investigation — such as the NTSB, the FAA and other relevant authorities — can access the material. The process, "is like a crime investigation," Houbing Song, an electrical engineer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who helped develop flight recorder systems for the FAA, told Live Science. Unlike earlier designs that used magnetic tape, information in modern flight recorders is stored in a solid-state memory card, like the ones used in laptops and mobile phones. The first step in the recovery process involves ensuring that the memory card is intact and making a copy of the information, Song said. The investigation could take a month or years to complete, depending on the nature of the accident, he said. Besides accident investigations, flight recorders provide valuable safety information for airlines during normal operations. Several commercial airlines collaborate with the FAA on a voluntary program, called Flight Operational Quality Assurance, that allows airlines to download part of the flight recorders' data for quality control. For instance, the FAA might check for fuel usage, potential engine issues, or other operational inefficiencies. RELATED MYSTERIES —How long does it take to travel to the moon? —If humans could fly, how big would our wings be? —What's the fastest recorded wind speed? "The idea is to identify a trend before it becomes an incident or an accident," Esser said. Although flight recorders hold valuable information, they can only be accessed post-flight. This limitation could become problematic in cases where the recorders are damaged or cannot be recovered. Several initiatives are now looking at innovations that allow real-time data transmission from the flight recorders that can help overcome this limitation. "The technology is there now; it's just a question of implementation," Esser said.
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Suspended in time: ethereal photos that look like landscape paintings
The landscape is an enduring subject of renowned French-German artist Elger Esser's work. His images often feature bodies of water, with rivers and lakes providing the focus for bucolic country scenes, or brooding seascapes, with vast skies and distant shores. With Sky and Sand, Esser invites viewers into a meditative world that reflects his deep connection to France, a country he describes as carrying 'history in its landscape like no other'. Elger Esser: Sky And Sand is at Flowers gallery, London, until 26 April Esser's photographs are deeply rooted in the artistic legacy of the French landscape, drawing inspiration from masters such as Monet, Courbet and Chateaubriand. Yet his unique vision, evident in his attention to dramatic skies and the fusion of motif and mood, brings a poetic quality to his works, shaping what he describes as 'internal landscapes' Elger Esser: 'I took my first night shot here in 1998 and returned in 2018 to take another shot from the same spot, in a different season and different light. Les Andelys is on the Seine. For young people, this is where their honeymoon took them, from the suburbs of Paris, if they didn't have much money, for a weekend, not longer, and it is this view over the Seine that many couples probably remember. So it's obviously just a beautiful river view, but it's also part of a collective memory of many generations' 'A very rare moment in which the Mont Saint Michel is surrounded by very high tide. The commune is a complete island and the mainland is flooded. You can see the crowds gathering on the right hand side of the image. In my two years of documenting the Mont Saint Michel, I was only able to witness this moment once,' says Esser 'This image was made shortly before Covid hit the world. I was hunting for sceneries closely related to the photography of Gustave Le Gray. Le Gray was a photographer in the 19th century who described himself as an artist, not just a photographer. Being able to create an image that is so similar in feeling, with the sun breaking through the clouds and the lone sailboat on the horizon, felt like a gift. Gustave Le Gray was also the first to use a form of Photoshopping in his images, using two different negatives, one of the sky and one of the sea, to create one image' 'This is Kerhervy, a little place in Brittany, France. I started to take images of this boat graveyard about 10-15 years ago' 'The Bridge of Beaugency situated on the river Loire. It was inspired by the children's story The Cat and the Devil by James Joyce. In the story a devil who offers to build a bridge gets outsmarted by a clever mayor,' Esser says A key feature of Esser's practice is his innovative use of materials and techniques. For Sky and Sand, he incorporates silver-plated copper plates and Diasec face techniques, melding historical processes with contemporary advancements. 'Silver and copper have been photographic materials from the very beginning,' Esser says, referencing the early photographic experiments of Niépce Esser's artistic vision extends beyond the physical medium to explore the fluidity of time and space. He describes his works as existing in a 'time tunnel' connecting the past, present and future This temporal suspension is at the heart of Sky and Sand, where landscapes become metaphors for memory and history. Esser adds: 'They tell of lingering, traveling, staying and passing away, a state of suspension between heaven, sky and sand' 'My ambition has always been to make a timeless photograph – one that can age well, far from being datable' Esser was born in Stuttgart, raised in Rome and now lives and works in Düsseldorf. Esser studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under the tutorship of Bernhard Becher
