Why the fuck would they have only hours of recording? Even my cheap voice recorder can go for hundreds of hours
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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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.
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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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Plausible deniability.
Oopsie whoopsie. Looks like I deleted the evidence against me and I'll go free now...
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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