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.
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.
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.