The cockpit voice recorder data on the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet which lost a panel mid-flight on Friday was overwritten, U.S. authorities said, renewing attention on an industry call for longer in-flight recordings.
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data.
The U.S. requires cockpit voice recorders to log two hours of data versus 25 hours in Europe for planes made after 2021.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has since 2016 called for 25-hour recording on planes manufactured from 2021.
“There was a lot going on, on the flight deck and on the plane. It’s a very chaotic event. The circuit breaker for the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) was not pulled. The maintenance team went out to get it, but it was right at about the two-hour mark,” Homendy said.
The NTSB has been vocal in calling for the U.S. to extend its rule to 25 hours. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) a month ago said it was proposing to extend to 25 hours – but only for new aircraft.
I understand that there are definitely some limitations in CVR due to durability requirements, but given the capabilities we have today for very tiny immense storage of audio recordings, I don’t see any reason the US shouldn’t at the minimum match the european standard of 25 hours. Not only that, but find a way to retrofit the new CVRs into older airframes.
But the price of memory is due to go up again!
Again? I forgot about that
Don’t get distracted by shiny objects and squirrels here folks. Boeing should be the focus here.
2 hours? What the fuck?
Well yeah, at one point that’s all the technology could handle reasonably. And then it was just never updated.
Ridiculous it hasn’t been updated
There’s a lot of laws or regulations that end up this way because nobody is required to do any periodic review.
There’s more than 30,000+ federal statutes alone. Not including agencies, standards boards, state laws, etc.
As great as that would be, I’m not sure it could be done. (Good use for ai? Read all the laws and spit out a list of obsolete laws or things that need review?)
The entire airline industry runs on antiquated tech.
Between new certifications being needed for everything, and an attitude of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, combined with the constant attempts to save money, airplanes are rarely updated.
Because if you crash you only need to review the immediate events leading up to a crash. 2 hours is generally plenty. If a plane is hijacked and then crashed, you don’t need 5 or 10 hours of voice to know what caused the crash.
The point of the CVR was to find out what went wrong or what errors happened leading up to a catastrophe, not what the pilots had for breakfast 5 flights prior.
But with modern datastorage prices there’s really no excuse not to make it longer. With 15GB you can store 24 hours of extremely high quality audio.
I feel like I’m saying this on an almost weekly occurrence:
McDonnel-Douglas ruined Boeing.Aside from that, it’s more appropriate to call them McBoeing these days.
Do please elaborate, or give some pointers. Am unfamiliar with the background.
MD was going out of business. Boeing bought them, but for some reason put the executives from MD in charge of Boeing after the merger. Boeing is now prioritizing cost savings over quality, cutting down worker and training, and has been suffering from quality issues since the merger.
Ten billion iq move
Until their Air Force One, or any of their other defense products start being produced the way they produce aircraft that the general public uses, we will continue to be the guinea pigs to see how much regulation can be stripped away for profit margins until we start to die at rates that become unprofitable for them. Industry never really learned from the Triangle Shirtwaste Fire and safety regulations will continue to be written in blood because ALL legislators would rather take donations and shut up than challenge a component of the MIC.
Yeah so that has already happened with the KC-46 the pentagon quit accepting deliveries twice
https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/28229-How-KC-46-Pegasus-became-another-737-MAX
You’re clearly referring to train derailments. Oh wait…
because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data.
OK, I agree it should be longer. We are no longer limited to magnetic tape spools. But once the aircraft is parked and shut down, why not stop the recording without having to pull a circuit breaker?
The CVR starts recording when the engines start running, and goes until both engines shut down with weight on wheels. It does not start recording when the aircraft has electrical power.
That’s just it. Did they run the engines on the ground for an hour so that it got overwritten?
That’s what I’m wondering. The location the plane landed at may have gotten a maintenance check that night, but someone dropped the ball on downloading the FDR and CVR before doing so. Usually, when a plane is involved in an incident, it goes into quarantine until the FAA and NTSB have finished.
Ugh boeing should just be nationalized. I don’t trust them to go above and beyond in safety anymore. I will be purposely trying to fly Airbus if I have the option.
Give Boeing a choice- retain 25 hours of flight records, or pay a billion dollars for every incident where the data is requested but was destroyed to save disk space that costs about nothing to keep
What’s the reason for not doing 25 hours in this day and age? It’s not physical media, right? Digital storage is cheap.
Boeing doesn’t have to fulfill that requirement. The CVR manufacturers will. Most likely it’s Honeywell or L3. Boeing will just have to install upgraded CVRs on new aircraft, while airlines will need to update if the FAA ever gets around to updating the requirements.
It sure seems like the flight systems were aware of a catastrophic failure of some sort and this could be automated. I mean why does this need manual intervention. It’s not like that data storage for that info is huge, or at least it shouldn’t be.
Either they don’t care or they specifically want this data to not be reliably available.
I am a little surprised there isn’t a catastrophic “save last 5 minutes” type thing like with a dashcam. I guess in many cases that last 5 minutes would have been saved by the fact that it crashed, but the issue was overlooked for planes that suffer a major event and stay in the air.
In this case, I seriously doubt the pilots’ conversation is going to add much to the investigation. It seems pretty obvious what happened and outside the pilots’ control.
My cheap dashcam does rolling saves if days worth of HD video… but aviation safety can only manage 2 hours of audio? Weeks worth of buffer should be trivial to add from both an economic and operational standpoint, and would have solved this issue (though not the door, obviously).
The logs should be getting pushed to a meaningful amount of local storage, and radio chatter saved centrally (there’s almost certainly amateurs stockpiling these recordings - large institutions are definitely capable).
Better yet, upload the info regularly. Remember MH370, where we only know roughly what happened because it occasionally checked in with satellites? So the capability exists.
Oh - we absolutely should be doing that, particularly when the passengers can use the Internet on flights already - but that seems like a (entirely reasonable) heavier lift, compared to a trivial storage upgrade and/or a minor config change to match euro standards or better.
Keep in mind this is just the voice recordings (what was said inside the cabin and not transmitted), the avionics data and the transmissions they have.
Voice recorded data in this incident would get you what? The error was Boeing or door install. Voice recording catch errors of pilots.
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