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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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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[-] lowleveldata@programming.dev 97 points 10 months ago

Why the fuck would they have only hours of recording? Even my cheap voice recorder can go for hundreds of hours

[-] Ross_audio@lemmy.world 90 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 9 points 10 months ago

It's an example of engineers being handed a requirement and meeting it.

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works 11 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 26 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago
[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Oopsie whoopsie. Looks like I deleted the evidence against me and I'll go free now...

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[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 17 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] ikidd@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

How much could a banana cost, Michael? 10 bucks?

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[-] Atom@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

....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.

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[-] Railing5132@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

To be fair, your voice recorder probably can't withstand being slammed into the ground at 500mph...:P

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 11 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] jaybone@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Probably when these regulations were put in place in the 1960s or whenever, there were technical limitations on these recording devices.

[-] EmpathicVagrant@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Yeah that’s pretty goddamned short. If you can only record two hours you’d better not have flights longer than that.

[-] pc486@reddthat.com 3 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] sdoorex@slrpnk.net 41 points 10 months ago

No surprise here since Boeing owns the FAA.

[-] Red_October@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 10 points 10 months ago

I assume you meant 737.

[-] RubberElectrons@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] wahming 5 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] Crackhappy@lemmy.world 37 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

But the price of memory is due to go up again!

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[-] badbytes@lemmy.world 28 points 10 months ago

Don't get distracted by shiny objects and squirrels here folks. Boeing should be the focus here.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 11 points 10 months ago

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...

[-] june@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago
[-] piecat@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

Well yeah, at one point that's all the technology could handle reasonably. And then it was just never updated.

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[-] derf82@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

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?

[-] pragmakist@kbin.social 26 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] Dettweiler42@lemm.ee 14 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] tb_@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Do please elaborate, or give some pointers. Am unfamiliar with the background.

[-] Dettweiler42@lemm.ee 10 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] agitatedpotato@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[-] Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

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

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[-] BeautifulMind@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

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

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[-] ErinCrush@lemm.ee 12 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] limelight79@lemm.ee 8 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] WaxedWookie@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

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).

[-] limelight79@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] billwashere@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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