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.
It’s an example of engineers being handed a requirement and meeting it.
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!
They probably did. There’s a reason that businesses set retention policies on emails stating that everything gets deleted after a certain amount of time, regardless of space. They don’t want the record to exist to be found during the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
They literally did. The ICAO adopted the 25 hour standard in 2016, dumbass.
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.
We just have another person sit in the cockpit and write down everything that happens around them. Don’t need to worry about pulling the breaker that way.
Plausible deniability.
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.
Nobody blamed the pilots, but Boing tho !
The pilots do oppose having 25 hrs of recordings tho, under privacy concerns. Source
Whether that’s a valid concern or not is another question entirely.
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.
How much could a banana cost, Michael? 10 bucks?
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.
Yeah that’s pretty goddamned short. If you can only record two hours you’d better not have flights longer than that.
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 373 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 assume you meant 737.
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.
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
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?
I’m just guessing, but if the plane suddenly decided it’s parked and shut down while it’s actually in the air …
We might want that recording.It would take a metric buttload of things going wrong for that condition to happen. There are a lot of sensors tied to detecting that the aircraft is on the ground, and the system fails safe in air mode.
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.
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
Yeah, I might have been unclear, I knew that other telemetry was available and it was just the voice recordings that were wiped due to the time they operated after the incident.
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.
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.
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.
#fuckingcapitalists