The little black boxes in airplanes provide useful information after a crash has taken place. Now researchers have___1___a way to use black box info from planes that do not___2___—to help prevent accidents from ever happening.

Some airlines already use a program that checks 88 flight parameters in the black box. But a Boeing 787 can record 2,000 flight parameters. So the researchers employed what’s called cluster analysis. They took data from 365 flights of Boeing 777s in a month of___3___of a now-defunct European airline. They filtered the data into clusters, groupings of flights with similar___4___. Any data points outside of normal operations appeared as an anomaly.

The information generated identified three problematic flights. In one, for instance, the data showed that the pilot had trouble rotating the plane during___5___.

The system can identify anomalies that suggest both physical and operational issues—such as those that caused a runway accident in Chicago in December 2005.

The researchers from M.I.T. and Spain will present their paper in October at the 30th Digital Avionics Systems Conference in Seattle. Because，to prevent future accidents, you might have to think inside the box.
【视听版科学小组荣誉出品】
devised crash operations patterns take off
飞机上的小黑匣子可以在飞机事故后提供有用信息。现在，研究者们利用从没出事的飞机上黑匣子里面的信息来阻止事故的发生。 有些航线已经利用一种软件，这种软件可以检查88次飞行信息。但是一架波音787飞机可以记录2000次飞行信息。因此，研究人员使用了一种集中分析技术。他们能够收集到现在已经不在使用在欧洲航线的波音777的在一个月中的365次飞行。他们过滤了数据库中的信息，集中那些有相似点的飞行。任何被排除在外的普通飞行会被认为是异常。 这些信息中出现了3个明显的问题航线。挑其中一个来说，数据显示这架飞机在起飞时不能正常转动。 这个系统能识别异常的情况，通常是物理和机械问题。例如在2005年12月份引起的跑道事故。 麻省理工和西班牙的研究者在10月30号在西雅图召开的的“电子航空系统会议”上，发表了文章。因为，如果要避免事故，我们必须认真研究黑匣子。