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.
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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.
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.
The FAA reqs are the relic. You don’t just get to go nuts and add whatever you want to a product - especially on airplanes. They were given the requirements and met them.
I’m sure the FAA reqs specify a minimum.
Yeah, that’s my point. The minimum is 2 hours. We deal with a lot of minimums and the culture doesn’t really involve going past requirements. This is something you probably buy, rather than make in house (though I may be mistaken), so you’re just going to find the one that meets minimum specs.
Huh. What do I think? Let me tell you what I think, Stan. If you want Boeing to have 25 hours of audio like your pretty boy EASA over there, then why don’t you just make the minimum 25 hours of audio?
I agree. In fact it should probably be 240 hours of audio. I was simply refuting the slander on random engineers, as though they’re the ones who made the choice of only two hours.
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.
That and, more practically, after a certain amount of time you just don’t need the papers. The world generates so much data and most of it anymore is unnecessary, redundant, or obsolete within a few months of generation. It absolutely makes sense to retain data for five or ten years, but after that… At what point is it just hoarding stuff no one will ever look at?
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.
It makes a little sense but personally I believe EVERYTHING that happens in the cockpit could be very important details, if the pilots want privacy there are other places in the plane. Autopilot does most ofnthe job letting them take brakes etc… Of course I am no pilot and haven’t even been on a plane so my point is not very valuable.
I’m not sure I want the pilots to leave the cockpit so they can have a conversation they don’t want to have recorded… “If you’re here, who’s flying the plane?”
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?
Here’s some money, go see a Star War
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.
To be fair, your voice recorder probably can’t withstand being slammed into the ground at 500mph…:P
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.
Probably when these regulations were put in place in the 1960s or whenever, there were technical limitations on these recording devices.
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 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 assume you meant 737.
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.
The other guy thought it was too much of a pain in the ass to even spell 737 correctly tho. But yes, some things absolutely should be a pain in the ass. Like when something going even slightly wrong will likely kill someone.
“Oh wahming’s such a pain in the ass, that’s why we love him”.
“Wahming’s being a pain in the ass, it’s so great.”
Yep. Reading comprehension.
Jeez.
He called the FAA a pain in Boeing’s ass, a company we hate. Not a pain in ours. Especially in the original context where he was denying that Boeing controls the FAA. How are you not getting it.
Some combination of being tired and too many to-dos.
My comment was more about how the FAA had been coopted by the enemy, and it seemed like the guy was lambasting how expensive getting airframes certified by the FAA was, as if it was anything but an important and necessary expense. On re-read it still seems like that, but I also don’t care, don’t know you and also don’t care.
Not just that, but all the tooling and manufacturing space needed is insanely expensive. The max mostly just needed tooling for the nacelles/pylons.
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.
Eh, why not both? The airplane is a BIG problem, but this is a big issue too that should not be overlooked because we have another problem…
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.
Thats not really true at leat according to aircrash investigation shows. Crew can make mistakes hours earlier that might lead to a crash or accident later. Mess up something during preflight checks and that can be the issue during later stage. Flights are long.
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.
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 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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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