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
To be fair, your voice recorder probably can’t withstand being slammed into the ground at 500mph…:P
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.
They probably still use physical tape.
Modern DVDR (digital voice data recorder) use nvme storage now. Tape is still in use on old planes, but I would suspect this brand new max has the newer versions.
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.
You have to recertify the component on each aircraft you install it on. If the manufacturer doesn’t have a reason to update a component they won’t recertify it.
Probably when these regulations were put in place in the 1960s or whenever, there were technical limitations on these recording devices.
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.
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.