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.
Why the fuck would they have only hours of recording? Even my cheap voice recorder can go for hundreds of hours
An example of a corporation doing the bare minimum required by law.
Laws which they’ve lobbied and used regulatory capture to slow any updates.
Regulations are important.
These regulations were written a long time ago when physical tape was used. Boeing has since captured the American regulatory system.
No. If an engineer were to design this system today, it’d have hundreds of hours of recording.
This is either a mandate from management, a relic from old systems that haven’t been updated, or a combination.
To be entirely fair your cheap voice recorder is not expected to also survive a plane crash. That being said European planes have more without issue so yeah.
2-3 large NVMe drives, mirrored to each other and properly encased, would provide years worth of recordings and survive a crash. They save so little because they want to.
Ah, yes, why didn’t the aviation engineers of the entire world think of that? Such a simple solution to a complex problem!
Oopsie whoopsie. Looks like I deleted the evidence against me and I’ll go free now…
In this situation the pilots are absolutely not at fault. You’re assertion fails all know evidence so far.
This isn’t entirely an excuse, but a CVR has some pretty serious durability requirements. They’re required to withstand physical forces, sustained exposure to direct flame, lengthy submersion in sea water…it’s not a trivial device.
On top of all that, you have to factor in the development and testing costs for the CVR or FDR too. These are usually off the shelf, previously developed components. A seemingly trivial change like bigger storage suddenly costs several hundred thousand dollars to retest and time to recertify by dozens with agencies around the world. If the regulations have not changed, then there is no reason for to go through that whole R&D process again when the same bought and paid for system works.
…which you’d think has all already been done, since Europe pretty much uses the same airplanes as the US, so compatible equipment ought to exist.
Even my cheap voice recorder can go for hundreds of hours
Only marginally related, but I run into this a lot with “Why can’t I have more space in my homedir? I can go buy a disk from BestBuy and it’s only $50.” The two products - a TEAM disk from BB and the media approved for enterprise (let alone emergency/recovery) work are from two different worlds.
Flight recorders have a very long history with modern ones being engineered in the 1960s. They used film and magnetic tape loops, having very limited capacity. That’s where we get 2 hours from. Early ones only ran for 30 minutes, so 2 hours is pretty good in comparison.
It’s time to upgrade the regulations to match our current technology instead of 1990s limitations.
Modern ones are solid state and the owner can choose how long they want to record for. Most ETOPS aircraft will record for much longer than 2 hours. I believe my airline records for 25 hours, even though our aircraft are not based in Europe.
Absolutely. My comment is about why a regulation would be 2 hours when today we can get more capable, air rated parts. US regulation is lagging behind, but it was based on what was within reach 20+ years ago. Heck, I bet most craft would eventually become 25 hours voice recording as older standard recorders become no longer available.
No surprise here since Boeing owns the FAA.
The reason the 737 has been redesigned and retooled and extended so many times is that certifying an entirely new airframe with the FAA is a wildly expensive and time consuming process. I’m not denying that Boeing has a lot of influence, but they clearly don’t own the organization that has been such a pain in their ass in the first place.
I’ll remind you that pain in the ass was specifically protecting the public from everything the 737 Max has become. Now we see what happens once GWB et al have permitted ‘self-certification’ by Boeing-designated FAA proxies, on Boeing’s payroll.
What a low-quality take, holy shit.
He called them a pain in Boeing’s ass. He did not claim nor imply that was a bad thing. It wasn’t a low quality take, you just lack reading comprehension.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
