hwThe little black boxes in the aeroplanes provide useful information after a crash has taken place. Now researchers have devised a way to use black box info from planes that do not crash to prevent accidents from never happening. Some airlines already used a program that checks 88 flight in the black box, and a Boeing 747 can record 2000 flight parameters. So the researchers employed what is called cluster analysis. They took data from 365 flights from Boeing 777s and among the operations of the now-** European airline. They filtered the data into clusters, groupings of flights with similar patterns. Any date points outside of normal operations appear as an anomaly. The information generated identified three problematic flights. In one, for instance, the data showed the pilot had trouble rotating the plane during takeoff. The system can then identify ano** that suggested both physical and operational issues such as those that caused a wrong way accident in Chicago in December in 2005. The researchers from MIT 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.