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Alaska 737 cockpit voice recorder data erasure renews safety debate
- 8organicbits 3y agohttps://archive.is/C66NT https://archive.is/C66NT
- belltaco 3y agoMaybe they can use a service like Starlink to stream voice, location and blackbox data to a secure location on land, that way even if the flight is lost or destroyed we would know what happened, or even where the heck it is(looking at you MH370).
- throwaway5959 3y agoWhy not just record more than 2 hours? Maybe two days worth of audio instead?
- __m 3y agoThe captain would likely also have disabled starlink and pulled the circuit breaker in the case of MH370, I wouldn’t be surprised if the VCR and FDR reveal nothing once we find them.
- belltaco 3y agoMaybe, but the recordings until that point would still be available, so we would atleast hear what happened to the copilot and what did they say etc. How is that worse compared to now where we don't even know where the plane is? Just the underwater search cost $200M, with no results. Would've costed more if they didn't give up so easily.
- cm2187 3y agoMH370 is maybe not a good example, but AF447 is a good one.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoYeah, they can use Starlink to stream it across X, then store it (distributed, hashed, salted, and encrypted) in Tesla on-board storage. Only gold verified X users would get to access it without FAA permission.
- panick21_ 3y agoI'm serious when Musk is in play people actually throw out their brains just get some virtual upvotes. Or just make incredibly stupid jokes. SpaceX is US military contractor with very high security clearance. Starlink is literally used in war against nation state attackers.
- TMWNN 3y agoIt's not Musk, per se; it's that Musk is conflicting with The Narrative(TM), thus is a target. At least HN is better than Reddit, which is jam-packed with human NPCs, who react in similarly predictable ways without intelligence. A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of 2021 that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see. If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way; as NPCs. At least GPT AI can produce useful and interesting output.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoI actually think Starlink is a super cool project, even if I wish someone else was in charge of it. I'm grateful that Musk managed to make electric cars "cool", and that his personality will make them more acceptable to conservatives that might otherwise have a knee-jerk resistance, and I think that Tesla actually did a lot to push the technology and the economy of electric cars. I think it's wonderful that we're investing more into space, even if, again, I would prefer someone else to be in the drivers' seat. I absolutely recognize Musk's contribution to things that I value and respect. I also think it's a little absurd how often he's brought up in completely unrelated discussions. It's a little like how whenever someone mentions that at-home electricity storage is a bit of an open question, people bring up flywheels, even though Powerwalls are a much more reasonable approach, just because they think flywheels are rad. The amount of times people try to shoehorn a Musk-related technology, (or even say "Hey let's get Elon on this, I bet his infinite money and brains could solve e.g. food distribution with um drones and Starlink and Boring Company I don't know he'll figure it out) makes it a little hard to take his biggest proponents seriously.
- dgrin91 3y ago(1) Starlink for airplanes is very expensive. Multiply that by many many thousands of planes and its $$$$$$$$. (2) With that many planes you start to get into Starlink bandwidth issues. Cant it support that many? I honestly don't know (3) Its a new complicated piece of equipment that may fail. What if the transmitter is broken? Blackbox systems are much simpler (4) A lot of this data is already transmitted (speed, altitude, position, etc, just not voice), so no need to build a system for it.
- panick21_ 3y agoThere are many other system other then Starlink you could also use. And most airlines already have these installed anyway. And if a new plane costs minimum 25 million $, and most cost 50 million $ or more, a few 1000s to safely record data seems reasonable. Bandwidth issue for a bunch of audio files? I think we can figure that out. > (3) I don't think a single person would suggest we replace the Blackbox. This would be in addition, not instead. > (4) I'm sue the plane produces lots of data that isn't transmitted. It would generally be smart to transmit far more data then we currently do and I'm not sure those methods are up to large increases. But if they are, then yes that would be good.
- dgrin91 3y agoFor the cost - you are talking about the capex. Starlink would go under opex, and thats where the margins lie. You can probably make the numbers work, but no one wants to touch this. For bandwidth - there are typically around 10k planes in the sky at any time, and that number typically grows. Thats 10k audio files streaming at a time, all day, every day. Add to that the nominal Starlink traffic that already causes bandwidth issues and you end up with probably non-trivial bandwidth issues until there is larger scaleup
- axus 3y agoPassengers can get a decent network connection on planes these days, no need to make a totally new system. But it's best effort; I'd still want a local copy that's a separate system from the uploaded audio.
- gumby 3y agoWhy starlink? Planes typically use Inmarsat which provides better coverage. Various aircraft data are already uploaded in flight ("stream" would be an exaggeration though) as you can see from the MH370 example you cited. The data uploaded are increasing as companies like Rolls-Royce become more of a data company. The black boxes are pretty robust (assuming you can find them!) and uploading the voice data is probably not worth the cost.
- dylan604 3y ago> Planes typically use Inmarsat which provides better coverage. Ask the families of MH370 how well Inmarsat works.
- hef19898 3y agoIf the pilot can disconnect Inmarsat, he can disconnect Starlink. He might even be able to disconnect Twitter and in-flight entertainment.
- belltaco 3y agoBut we would have the communications and real time location till the disconnect happened. In case of MH370 and Alaska 737 those are lost. That would give us clues as to what happened.
- meindnoch 3y agoOnly if it's on a blockchain. *checks calendar* oh sorry, it's not 2021.
- benhurmarcel 3y agoCurrently it’s fairly common that a lot of flight data is logged during the flight, and transmitted to a server via 4G when on ground. It doesn’t help when the aircraft gets destroyed, but it does create fairly big databases for analysis and preventive maintenance.
- cptcobalt 3y agoThis is a proposal from the NTSB to the FAA to raise the CVR recording time from 2 hours to 25 hours, in line with ICAO. This is very likable scenario for everyone except pilots unions. > The NTSB has conducted 10 investigations since 2018 where the CVR was overwritten, including four runway incursions, Homendy said. I tuned into the NTSB press brief last night, and they emphasized understanding communication is important for the best accident analysis. Homendy stated that they now do not have any record of communication between the flight deck and cabin.
- wolverine876 3y agoWhy stop at 25? Record all of every flight and archive it. Develop a standardized structure to make it searchable by different factors or combinations of factors (e.g., 777 model later than Z & decending & outside temp < X & throttle is > Y & etc.) When there's an accident, you could review similar circumstances. From my ignorant perspective on air safety, it would seem to be a gold mine.
- H8crilA 3y agoThis industry is ridiculously slow compared to IT. Air traffic comms (both voice AM and text ACARS/VDL) are not only not encrypted, but also crucially not even authenticated. So you can send text messages and speak to any aircraft at any privilege level (just say you're ATC) with a simple SDR. Or you can spoof a faulty engine message on the downlink channel.
- teovall 3y agoThe antiquated AM mode and the lack of encryption or even digital encoding is a safety feature for air traffic voice communications. Very weak signals still have a chance of being intelligible and if two signals are transmitted at once on the same frequency, both can still be heard.
- H8crilA 3y agoYeah but it's terrible for security. Also digital modes work just fine at the same range - I have no problem hearing ADS-B messages from up to 200mi away from my ground level antenna, where the max range is only limited by the curvature of the planet. And note that the real problem is with authentication (MACs, or digital signatures), not encryption. Public availability of those records is actually probably beneficial. It's a common misconception to think that you need to encrypt while in reality you perhaps need to encrypt, but first you absolutely must authenticate.
- meepmorp 3y ago> Pilots have also opposed the move [to add 25 hr recording], with the union representing pilots for air-freight company Atlas Air telling the FAA the longer recordings would be an invasion of worker privacy. > "(It) would significantly infringe upon the privacy rights of pilots and other flight crew members, as well as drastically increase the likelihood that CVR recordings will be misused or disseminated without authorization," the union said in a Dec. 28 response to the FAA's 25-hour proposal. I'm not sure I agree that flight crews of passenger aircraft should have an expectation of privacy while flying planes. It seems like one of those kinds of jobs where the risks involved and need to gather forensic data in the event of an accident should outweigh the pilots' privacy concerns. Maybe add some regulation w.r.t. disseminating the recordings outside of releases by the NTSB as part of accident investigations.
- JohnBooty 3y agoIt seems like one of those kinds of jobs where the risks involved and need to gather forensic data in the event of an accident should outweigh the pilots' privacy concerns Reading between the lines, I think the concern is that pretty much any flight might contain minute violations of things like the "sterile flight deck rule"[1] and it would probably be easy to find a reason to fire any given pilot if airlines could just comb through endless amounts of recordings. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_flight_deck_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_flight_deck_rule
- dylan604 3y agoIf you're chitchatting in the cockpit and that causes things to get missed, that's very pertinent to the investigation. I don't care if that chitchat is about some sportsball banter, some personal info about relationships/work/etc, or anything. If you can't focus on the job while you're on the job, that's something that needs to be understood. So I'm very much in agreement that this privacy claim is nonsense when these "private" conversations directly affect the lives of 150+ passengers/crew. It's not like a couple of coders chatting away. Lives are not on the line.
- wkat4242 3y ago
- ginko 3y agoHow much data can 25h of voice and instrument recordings be? Even with multiple channels and uncompressed it can barely be more than a couple gigabytes.
- don_neufeld 3y agoYou’re applying a technical standard to a people problem. The issue here is likely legal liability, as evidenced by the pilot’s union opposition to longer recordings.
- frakt0x90 3y agoIdk how the devices work but if you have to replace them to get the extra capacity, it would still cost the airlines money, and the FAA has historically been very friendly with airlines.
- peterleiser 3y agoIt's not about cost or technology. The pilot's union is against longer recordings.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd cost, according to a FAA quote in the linked article.
- Ekaros 3y agoRetrofit would cost money. But mandating years ago that new planes and anything going throw certain levels of maintenance would have update would not be that expensive.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWhy is that?
- polpo 3y agoGiven that Boeing currently has to ship planes to Europe with 25 hours of recording capacity, and that this plane is only a few months old, I'd guess it already has 25 hours of capacity and it's artificially limited to 2 because it was shipped to the US, due to the opposition from pilot's unions.
- InTheArena 3y ago[flagged]
- JohnBooty 3y agoDo you have references to share?
- Maxious 3y ago> The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Local 2750, representing the pilots of Atlas Air, is submitting for the record the following comments regarding the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)'s proposed rulemaking > A twenty-five hour recording mandate significantly encroaches upon the privacy of flight crew members. Conversations and activities in the cockpit, whether or not related to flight operations, being recorded and potentially scrutinized, unnecessarily creates a sense of continuous surveillance and severely undermines the trust and morale among crew members https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FAA-2023-2270-0006 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FAA-2023-2270-0006
- hef19898 3y agoThis is hardly proof for the alledged conspiracy between maintenance crew and pilot unions to cover up flight crew fuck ups by limiting CVRD to two hours...
- InTheArena 3y agoThis is a very long running issue for labor unions. This is far from the first example of people "forgetting" that data will be erased.
- hef19898 3y agoStarting to over-write after two hours is, according to the article, standard for the US by law. No need to spill anti-Union conspiricies and propaganda.
- appplication 3y agoYeah, this is an inane, self-inflicted, and completely trivially solvable problem. The voice recorder overwrites itself on a two-hour loop. Two hours of voice data takes about a gigabyte of space at most. There is no technical barrier to right sizing this, and there is nothing special about the aerospace use case that prevents it. Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? And why would it continue to overwrite itself after it’s grounded? Why is there no backup? Has it never been thought relevant to gather, say, an entire flights worth of data instead? This highlights a complete failure on multiple levels and an inability to critically think about the problem space. How much time was spent implementing a system that under most circumstances where it would be needed would render itself entirely useless?
- willcipriano 3y ago> Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate? Probably people in the 70s who thought having a recording at all is star trek stuff.
- pavlov 3y agoThat would be the same 1970s when the American president was forced to resign because of the extensive voice recordings he made. This wasn’t sci-fi stuff even back then.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoTape recorders are a century old, and tape loops were how answering machines, toys, instruments like the Melotron, and many other devices worked until the digital era. There a lot of things today that are less human-usable than they were a half-century ago, but also much more flexible and less expensive. We're still in a weird transitional phase post-transistor.
- hattmall 3y ago>most circumstances where it would be needed I think if the plane is still operational for 2 hours then the data is a lot less important than the alternative scenarios.
- Sebb767 3y agoWould the CVR have helped in this specific situation? I'd assume this was a flaw of the plane and the lack of recording is probably not that big of an issue.
- wkat4242 3y agoNo, but it would tell a lot about the response of the pilots, and whether they took any actions that might have endangered the plane more, even though the outcome was good.
- rogerbinns 3y ago> Would the CVR have helped in this specific situation? In the next one, yes. Note the goal is not to do blaming and shaming, but to reduce anything similar happening, and to increase effectiveness of response. For example did multiple alarms go off, so it took longer for the crew to establish what the problem was? How quickly and effectively did the crew respond to the problem, and did the procedures they followed work effectively? How saturated were the crew with things to do? How well did training scenarios correspond to the actual event? How well did CRM work? [1] As a result of looking at those, changes like the following could be made (and have been done as a result of previous investigations): * Updating how alarms are prioritised and presented * Updating flight management systems * Updating the procedures to troubleshoot and respond to this kind of event * Reducing workloads * Updating training scenarios * Using the incident as a good example of something being handled [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
- joot82 3y agoProbably not, but with a 25 hour recording window one could make sure that the previous crews did not notice any irregularities (that they might not have reported) or anything else that might have lead up to this incident. That's pretty mind boggling that a modern age voice recorder doesn't even support storing the timespan of an intercontinental flight.
- yread 3y agoIn this case the decompression blew away the reinforced cockpit door and the rushing air took away their checklist (and almost a headset) so they had to use the reference handbook (and/or do stuff from memory) so it would be interesting to hear how exactly it went. Also their communications were a bit confusing (no mayday?!) perhaps it was discussed in the cockpit.
- sowbug 3y agoI'm reminded of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect when I read the comments that express outrage at how technically easy it is to have longer recordings from the microphone that your employer has installed at your desk that automatically records everything you say at work.
- michael_j_x 3y agowell, they do record my slack messages for 2-3 months, and I am ok with that, even though that's my main method of communicating with my colleagues, and includes a number of personal conversations with them. Now, if my work required me to be able to verbally communicate with my colleagues, and the consequence of miscommunicating was the loss of 100s of lives and millions in property, then I would expect them to record every single thing I said, spoken or written, judiciously.
- wkat4242 3y agoThis two-hour thing also means that if we ever find MH370 we will still never know what actually happened at the beginning of the flight when it diverted. It really should have enough to save at least the longest flight possible.
- __m 3y agoDepends on how quickly the captain was able to disable the CVR.
- wkat4242 3y agoThat assumes the prevailing theory of malicious pilot was correct. Indeed if he did manage to turn it off early it might have contained something. However if that theory is indeed true, it's clear that he wanted to disappear without a trace. In that case it would have made sense to keep it running especially because it only keeps the last 2 hours. But yeah if it had been longer he would have turned it off in that scenario. It would be best if the CVR had a backup battery (and internal protection is that shorting out). In fact I remember reading in several admiral Cloudberg articles that the CVR and CDR data was incomplete due to bus power loss during accidents.
- jbverschoor 3y agowell well, what a surprise.
- __m 3y agoCharlie Victor Romeo https://charlievictorromeo.com/ https://charlievictorromeo.com/
- bookofjoe 3y agoThis interests me as a former neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years; retired in 2015). If you told me the anesthesia machine will have a microphone that will record voice in addition to the various physiological parameters recorded by the myriad monitors on the machine, I wouldn't have any problem with it.
- Doxin 3y agoYou're not at your anesthesia machine during your breaks. Pilots are in the cockpit ±the whole time.
- bookofjoe 3y agoAt least one pilot is in the cockpit the whole time. On long haul flights they take turns sleeping in a dedicated small room off the cockpit. Breaks during cases don't happen when you're in private practice in anesthesiology.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoHow convenient...
- olliej 3y agooh ffs, the fact that it's only 2 hours remains stupid: these same aircraft are sold in the eu that apparently requires more than that, it's clearly not some hard engineering problem, presumably someone doesn't want to pay $50 more per aircraft. But add to that the requirement that pilots have to remember to pull the CVR fuse to stop it overwriting, and then the malicious case where pilots have seemingly intentionally pulled the CVR fuse prior to illegal actions in order to disguise those actions, this is clearly a beyond brain dead system. The local recording should be more than two hours, but these days there's no justification for it not also being continuously uploaded.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoIt's technologically trivial, today, to perform an automated secondary backup (local or otherwise - but ideally remote) of days - months, years - of this telemetry and voice recorder data. (as well as to keep it private & encrypted, and only accessible with a warrant from a judge) If the FAA does not mandate, at least, this from now on, it will just add to the pile of evidence that they are in Boeing's pocket. PS: Secondary backup. No existing system has to change. Just an outer layer of backup tapping into the existing data recording loop.
- DrNosferatu 3y agoPPS: Give me USD 15M + 10K per aircraft + 10 cents per transported/flown passenger ever protected by this System, and I'll design and implement it for you - with quadruplex redundancy. (disclaimer: Founder tier pricing. General pricing may vary - up)
- hef19898 3y agoThis comment is peak HN arrogance, or pretty close to it...
- DrNosferatu 3y agoOh, but you haven't seen nothing yet - what about, on top of that, even some extra credibility: Former NASA Engineer, baby B-)
- hef19898 3y agoImpressive. Just tell me, when did NASA develop and build civilian aerospace components?
- DrNosferatu 3y agoNot the point - these are just peak HN arrogance credentials ;)
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoLOL "there is no evidence of a conspiracy"
- xenadu02 3y agoThe argument about privacy is a bit of a red-herring IMHO. The audio should be recorded for each flight plan (whether one segment or multiple) in its entirety. The system can automatically delete all recordings finished N or more hours ago on next power up (say 6 hours). In a crash scenario obviously power will be lost at some point and not return so the data is safe. In a malfunction scenario standard procedure would be to pull the box before powerup so even if maintenance doesn't get to the plane quickly or the pilot's incident report arrives after a few hours the recording related to it is still present and maintenance can go back and grab it. Or for scenarios where a malfunction beings on the early part of a multi-segment flight plan the data would still be available. But for pilot privacy the recordings are not held forever. During normal operations the plane will be powered down, eg while parked in-between flights, and when powered up older recordings get truncated. All telemetry should be streamed to a cloud service in real time. Absolutely no reason not to do that. No one should ever need to "search" for a plane or wonder what happened to it.
- vidanay 3y ago> In a crash scenario obviously power will be lost at some point and not return so the data is safe. Catastrophic crash scenarios are not the only scenarios where data preservation is desirable.
- xenadu02 3y ago> Catastrophic crash scenarios are not the only scenarios where data preservation is desirable. That's exactly why I said "In a malfunction scenario" in my comment. Modern aviation uses essentially a blameless post-mortem incident reporting process where pilots are encouraged to report when something unexpected happens - even though the airplane wasn't damaged and no one was injured. This has helped tremendously both in discovering issues that could be the cause of a crash in the future as well as improving training for other pilots. But very rarely is any data recovered in these situations. If things worked as I noted maintenance would have enough time to grab the data after the report without storing the recordings forever.
- mulmen 3y ago
- thih9 3y ago> no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data In a post iPod era and with a budget greater than the cost of an iPod, this is a non-issue. I wonder what the real issue is.
- pc86 3y agoIt's not a non-issue when every single staple, bolt, device, and piece of cloth needs certification and approval from a government agency.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoThe "real issue" is that CVR and FDRs are very complicated and specially built devices. They record detailed data and must protect it against ANY danger. Massive fires, being stuck at the bottom of the ocean, a plane slamming into the ground at a 90-degree angle, etc. They must allow data to be recovered in as many cases as possible, prioritizing that over raw data storage amount or convenience.
- thih9 3y agoIt's not really about storage amount or convenience if the data is lost. That's no different than not surviving a fire. The "it took longer than 2h to retrieve the voice recorder" seems one of the dangers then. And at least just as likely as many others, e.g. it's easy to imagine this happening together with "being stuck in a remote place".
- Night_Thastus 3y agoIt is not about how long it took. It's because the pilots forgot to pull the circuit breaker. In most crashes, both recorders lose power so it's not a problem. In cases like this and the plane is fine, the pilots need to pull the breakers. Recorders have been found months after accidents and still retain all data.
- amatecha 3y ago> 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 So.. what happens when a crash happens at 2:01 into a flight, you have just one minute of audio? how is that in line with the requirement to keep 2 hours of audio? > The maintenance team went out to get it, but it was right at about the two-hour mark > The plane's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were sent to NTSB labs on Sunday to be read but no voice data was available So as soon as that 2-hour mark is hit, the CVR secure-erases everything it recorded and starts anew? (data-recovery was not possible???) ... I feel like something is missing here...
- andrewguenther 3y agoIt doesn't clear every two hours, it's a rolling two hour recording. Since the plane was still operational, it continued recording and it was just over 2 hours before maintenance crews disabled the recorder.
- amatecha 3y agoOK, what you're saying is that the 2 hours of audio leading up to the crash were overwritten by the recording having continued for another 2 hours after the incident? So, it's just poor wording in the article?
- coppsilgold 3y agoIt's technically possible to make the recorder encrypt the recording in real time using asymmetric cryptography and a symmetric ratchet. Using a private key only the NTSB or some other agency would have, and create a legal framework where they need a court order to decrypt the ephemeral key and release it to investigators. This will eliminate the possibility of your employer or some technician spying on you through this vector as it would require the government to also have a significant interest in a single case.
- Havoc 3y agoTwo hours is ridiculous
- fxtentacle 3y agoThey should just bump it to a day, like in Europe. Easy to justify if you can see it working well elsewhere.