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.
Voice recorded data in this incident would get you what? The error was Boeing or door install. Voice recording catch errors of pilots.
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.
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.
As far as I know, there’s telemetry from the whole plain, not only the voice recording, so there might have been something useful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: but just after responding I found out that the rest of the data is intact, so I was wrong
Telemetry is going to be numerical data that likely compresses very well, so even with a large amount of sensors I can’t imagine it taking that much.
And yeah, voice users significantly less than video, where modern cheap dash cams can record days on a small SD card. Methinks flight recorders can do better. At the least they should be viable for the max flight time of the aircraft.
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.
2 hours? What the fuck?
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.
Well yeah, at one point that’s all the technology could handle reasonably. And then it was just never 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?)
