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.
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.