RUSH: I saw something on CNN this morning. Did you know that time is running out on the search for the Malaysian airliner? (inerruption) Well, I don’t know. They just said time is running out. I don’t know if they meant for CNN or if they meant for the airline, for the passengers, for the search team, but I thought you would like to know that time is running out.
If they don’t find something relatively soon, then they’re gonna have to stop searching, I guess. And if that happens, CNN’s gonna have to pick up the money to keep the search going, which they might do. It might be one of the wisest investments they’ve ever made.
“No, you can’t stop looking! It’s become our total programming. You’ve gotta keep looking. What’s it cost? All we need is one boat. We get B-roll of one boat, we’ll rent a C-130 to fly around and we’ll get video off of that, what is it gonna cost?”
Time is running out for the search? It could mean the black box, or the black boxes. What, do they have a 30-day shelf life or something like that? Once they’ve gone missing, they report for 30 days or 30 days to be found with any data that’s intact or what have you.
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RUSH: Jeff in Indianapolis. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hello, sir. It’s a great honor to speak to you today.
RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER: Well, I have a reason why the time is so short for locating this aircraft that has been missing for, what, three weeks now.
RUSH: Yeah, because CNN says time is running out.
CALLER: The underwater acoustical beacon which is attached to the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorders as well have a 30-day limit, so to speak, if they are located underwater, they are water activated —
RUSH: Did you say the underwater acoustical beacon? Is that what you said?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Okay. It’s got a 30-day life span.
CALLER: It has 30 days before the battery runs out. They won’t be able to find it unless somebody just like happens to stumble across it by that point.
RUSH: Well, which isn’t gonna happen 20,000 feet below the sea.
CALLER: Well, they’ve got all these warships out there and everything like that. I was in the Navy. They can turn their listening devices or sonar and everything like that on passive, and they can hear this thing if they pass over it.
RUSH: No, I meant nobody’s gonna stumble across it —
CALLER: Well, of course not.
RUSH: — at 20,000 feet. Here’s a question I’ve always had. You sound authoritative on this. Battery technology’s gotten somewhat better over the course of the life span of these flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders. And knowing that many of these air accidents takes longer than a month to find these boxes, why don’t they have more powerful batteries in them?
CALLER: Well, they’re limited in size, and being in aviation for 27 years as a mechanic, the technology has gotten better. The flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder has all gone to digital.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: There’s no more tapes or anything like that. And so the batteries have to keep up with the times. But, like I said, you know, they’re limited in space, and they just, you know, only last for 30 days.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: That’s basically the only answer I can give you because I’m not an expert in putting these things together.
RUSH: You know, people ask me because I’m a noted iPhone expert, and people constantly say to me, “I could care less about this feature, that feature, why do they give me a battery that’s only gonna last 24 hours? Why don’t they give me a battery that lasts 48 hours before I need it, why don’t do that?” The fact of the matter is when it comes to lithium ion batteries, we are pretty much at the maximum capability we can get out of that type of battery. There’s not a whole lot you can do other than get a bigger battery. So the way electronics firms that use these batteries try to maximize battery life is to write operating systems and use equipment that will put as little strain or usage on the battery as possible. Power management, it’s called. And it is a science into itself.
The software writing for your average cell phone — and I’m not gonna mention the company that’s best at it, but to me, knowing the size of a battery in an iPhone and how much they literally get out of that, it’s really amazing, if people knew. You know why there are big-screen phones? No. It has nothing to do with people being able to see them. You know why all these Android phones have five and five and five and a half-inch screen, is because they needed a battery that big to keep the phone on for eight hours. You couldn’t just put that big a battery in it with a small screen, so it was the need.
The Android system just churns battery power. So they had to create big phones, i.e., big displays, to put a big enough battery in the thing. It was the need for long-lasting battery power that gave you the big screened cell phones. Not the other way around. It wasn’t people trying to build a screen that you could see. It was people trying to build a phone that didn’t run out on you in eight hours that drove big screens and phones. Thanks for the call, Jeff. Appreciate it.
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RUSH: What? (interruption) No, I was not making that up. I don’t make anything up. Unless I’m joking with people, but even… (interruption) No, somebody’s asking me if I made up… Even the suggestion that I would make something up is an insulting question. I did not make up the fact that large-screen cell phones existed at first because the people that make them needed big batteries to give people a decent day’s worth of using.
That’s absolutely true. Don’t make me mention any brand names. There’s nothing… (interruption) All of those Android phones that had 4-inch screens — 3-1/2, 4-inch screens — which all phones did at one point? You couldn’t get six hours out of ’em. They had to go to big screens in order to use bigger batteries that could get a full day’s use out of a single charge. That’s what drove the move to large-screen cell phones. It wasn’t marketing brilliance.
“Hey, let’s do a bigger screen that people can actually see!” It was simply because they couldn’t provide all-day use on one charge in a 4-inch screen. They didn’t know. They weren’t adept at power management, so they just needed a bigger battery. They needed a battery twice as powerful as an iPhone’s battery to charge it the same length, to give it the same length of use as an iPhone got simply because Android system just sucks the juice, that’s all.
I didn’t make it up.
Why would I make that up?