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> The accident airplane was required to be equipped with a CVR that retained, at minimum, the last 2 hours of audio information, including flight crew communica
by aftbit 3y ago
> The accident airplane was required to be equipped with a CVR that retained, at minimum, the last 2 hours of audio information, including flight crew communications and other sounds inside the cockpit.
>The CVR was downloaded successfully; however, it was determined that the audio from the accident flight had been overwritten. The CVR circuit breaker had not been manually deactivated after the airplane landed following the accident in time to preserve the accident flight recording.
Classic. If they use CD quality audio at 1411kbps, they can store 2 hours of audio in about 1.2 GB. Given how cheap flash is these days, why not 20x that so that we don't have to rely on people pulling circuit breakers after accidents? If there's some concern about robustness and recertification, why not require all aircraft to carry two CVRs, one of the old "robust" style for kinetic accidents, and one that's less robust but has 20x the capacity, so we can record a full day after less violent accidents?
- cjbprime 3y agoThe largest US pilots union opposes it on pilot privacy grounds. (To be clear, I think having an expectation of vocal privacy while you are in charge of an airliner is absurd.)
- ekianjo 3y ago[flagged]
- gruez 3y agoHN isn't a monolith, and it certainly has better representation of anti-union sentiment (ie. they don't all get downvoted to oblivion) compared to other discussion forums (eg. reddit).
- cjbprime 3y agoI (person who blamed the pilots union above) actually like unions. I could probably even say good things about pilot unions; I would say that part of the reason US airlines have fewer accidents than some other wealthy countries is the effect the unions have had on resisting attempts to work pilots through dangerous levels of fatigue, and on ensuring pilots can report dangerous situations and have them comprehensively fixed without retaliation. I don't have faith in "market forces" to do those things, and consider the state of aviation in some other countries to be a living experiment showing why. The opposition to cockpit recording is bonkers, though.
- mrguyorama 3y agoIt's not bonkers. Notably, the pilot's union is not trying to turn back the current status quo of 2 hours recorded, they are blocking a significantly longer recording system. Such a system would inevitably record a few (probably) irrelevant flights worth of pilot chit chat and banter. Has anyone tried, oh IDK, compromising? Maybe instead of 24 hours, we do 6? Or up to 24 hours but only of the "current" flight that matters to the current event? It's a negotiation. The Pilot's union doesn't have veto authority on safety. Sure they can threaten to unanimously strike if it's passed and that might be a big threat to airlines since they have basically stopped investing in the funnel of new pilots, preferring instead to pay everyone food stamp wages and drag themselves through the obvious """Pilot Shortage""" that results when a job that costs $40k to get only pays $25k a year.
- CPLX 3y agoDo you have a voice recording of you doing your entire job, every day of your life?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WheatMillington 3y agoNo but I also don't have the lives of 300 people in my hands.
- Hamuko 3y agoPilots can have the lives of quite a lot more than that on their hands since an airplane makes for a great kinetic weapon. The pilots of KLM Flight 4805 took the lives of almost 600 people.
- csdreamer7 3y agoThere are software engineer jobs where you need to keep your camera on during work hours to show you are in your seat.
- andy81 3y agoYeah, but nobody applies for those.
- csdreamer7 3y agoThe people posting on Reddit would disprove your point. Likely because they do not tell you about that upfront and say it is a small thing.
- zorpner 3y agoThese jobs do not attract the best software engineers.
- 3y ago
- imoverclocked 3y agoWell, there is the theory and then there is the reality. Theory: having less privacy makes things easier for accident investigators, post-mortem. Reality: In this case, the pilots did their job and got the plane down safely despite rapid depressurization and literally having their headsets sucked off of their heads. It is extremely unlikely to be pilot-error that a door-plug ripped off the airframe at 16,000' or that investigators would learn anything significant from the process in the flight-deck before or after the incident. At least nothing that would root-cause this incident.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoYour comment would only make sense if your example of reality showed the theory was flawed. However, your example of reality is unrelated to the theory, so not sure what your point is.
- crznp 3y agoThat is a non-sequitur. Investigators should have access to accident data regardless of whether the pilots did their job. Root cause analysis isn't the only reason: it would be good for pilots to have this case study, as well as analysis on how systems responded to the abrupt change. Having this data is strictly better than not having it.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoMiddle ground would be to have full media access for investigators, but a union rep managing a review and redaction process to have anything immaterial to the investigation redacted. This preserves both valuable data and privacy. Checks and balances.
- p_l 3y agoI'd also propose that someone on the board has to be criminally responsible in case of any abuse. With asset forfeiture on the books.
- flutas 3y ago
- hencq 3y agoI think there's some validity to the privacy concerns, but it seems those could be addressed with proper access controls and rules. The recordings should only really be listened to in the aftermath of an accident, in which case, as you say, the expectation of privacy should (in my opinion) take a backseat.
- rantingdemon 3y agoIndeed. Pretty much all your communication is recorded at any company you work for anyway.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoMy work does not have a recording of most of my verbal communication in office, and it’s a very secure site and project.
- zer00eyz 3y agoOn one hand I agree with you. On the other hand, if someone recored my whole work day every day I would not be happy. I don't think you would stay at your job of that was a condition of it. There has to be a better solution to this issue.. extended recordings in an emergency, triggers based on conditions, private keys for pilots... IDFK, cause I try not to get involved in engineering that might KILL someone.
- cjbprime 3y agoI don't understand. Are you implying that recording a pilot's voice for more than two hours could kill someone? Or just that aviation is stressful and high stakes? (I agree that it's stressful and high stakes, which is why we record it.)
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoWhy not? Do you think other engineers are better suited for such work? I’m just curious, because I personally work on things that could kill people directly or indirectly.
- salad-tycoon 3y agoMy wife ridicules me because when we went out to eat, before a multitude of children , I would often say “nobody ever tipped me as a meat clerk when I was working in 45 degrees elbows deep throwing away and scraping rotting meat from the shelves and gutters and then serving ‘fresh shrimp ‘ and organic grass fed filet mignon” when I felt expected to tip 20% for an already over priced meal. As my first boss, meat clerk young lady, told me “shit rolls down hill.” More powerful people tend to get shitted on less. It was a motivation to move up. But I still think it’s shitting on people to expect or accept constant recording of everything mundane thing while awaiting the exceptional [screw up]. Pilots are more powerful than Amazon warehouse workers but recording every breath, every whisper, ever fart is undoubtedly shit in a warehouse or a cockpit or an operating room. Then again, the only way I could accept it is if everyone is recorded all the time and it was all public or at least FOIA able for many people. Especially the government and universities and Wall Street other wise it’s just a way to control and hang things over peoples heads. As to the tipping grumpiness I grew up partly in the 3rd world where tipping 50 cents was a great tip and I’m cheap and didn’t/don’t make tech bro money. I found the ultimate solution was to just not eat out so much except for truly special occasions. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there too somewhere.
- zardo 3y agoPrivacy from an NTSB accident investigation is absurd. Privacy from your boss snooping you is reasonable.
- SilasX 3y agoReminds me of an exchange from Stranger Things (S4E3): School counselor: Max, I'm… I'm sorry, I… I really can't discuss this. You wouldn't want me talking to any other students about you, right? Max: If I were dead and it would help catch the killer, then yeah, I most definitely would. https://subslikescript.com/series/Stranger_Things-4574334/season-4/episode-3-The_Monster_and_The_Superhero https://subslikescript.com/series/Stranger_Things-4574334/se...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- p_l 3y agoMake it so they don't have reasonable suspicion CVR data won't be abused by the company, and you might get somewhere. For example criminal consequences for misuse that hit C-level and possible leakers. Sincerely, someone who had death threats partially thanks to manipulated audio record that was done in good faith during investigation, which was leaked and edited later by third party who gained access to it 5 years later.
- samstave 3y agoDefine. What EXACTLY does a pilot need privacy for?
- dmitrygr 3y ago> Given how cheap flash is these days How cheap is flash that will survive a sudden stop from 400mph to 0 mph in no seconds flat, will survive a post-crash fire, and/or submersion for years in salt water? Flash data retention at high temps is TERRIBLE (and gets worse for MLC/TLC/etc), see any flash datasheet. It is NOT nearly as simple a problem as you might think. Yes, it is a solvable problem, but please do not dismiss it so outright as "trivial"
- N19PEDL2 3y agoRead it more carefully.
- ammar2 3y agoThis isn't a technical limitation though, the European standard for airplanes newer than 2021 is in fact 25 hours [1]. [1] https://mentourpilot.com/who-doesnt-want-25-hour-cockpit-voice-recorders/ https://mentourpilot.com/who-doesnt-want-25-hour-cockpit-voi...
- margalabargala 3y agoI don't think the problem you're describing is actually a problem. Exposure to super-high temps occurs in a small set of circumstances, all of which overlap with the destruction of the recording device and the cessation of incoming data. So we only need the same 1.2GB (or whatever) of high-temperature-tolerant storage. The 25 hour storage can be on normal flash, as if we're more than 2 hours past the incident and data is continuing to come in, then the incident of interest did not destroy the airplane, and the flash will have remained within its normal operating parameters.
- dmitrygr 3y agoMultiple investigations in the past have recovered data from FDR and/or CVR after an extensive high-temperature fire. I do not think that FAA will give that requirement up.
- margalabargala 3y ago
- bronco21016 3y agoWhat’s missing from this accident investigation without the recording?
- blantonl 3y agoability to somehow claim pilot error. That's what.
- sigwinch28 3y agoThe rule (edit: in Europe) is now 25 hours for aircraft over a certain weight, though it is not (currently) retroactively applied to existing equipment. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/12/04/2023-26144/25-hour-cockpit-voice-recorder-cvr-requirement-new-aircraft-production https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/12/04/2023-26...
- cjbprime 3y agoThat document is an in-progress proposal to amend a rule, no? I think there was strong opposition to this rule before this accident flight, and the blowback from the missing data here might be strong enough to be able to get it passed anyway.
- sigwinch28 3y agoIt is the rule in Europe, which is mentioned in (II)(C) in the link. I failed to link it properly.
- imoverclocked 3y ago> the blowback from the missing data here might be strong enough to be able to get it passed anyway Nice pun. What do you think would have been gained from the CVR data in this case? Do you think pilot error had anything to do with the door-plug failure? Do you think the CVR was left running on purpose/accident? If I were one of those pilots, the first words out of my mouth probably would have been, "what the $&#*?!" followed by whatever procedure had been drilled into me for rapid-depressurization. Given the scenario, I wouldn't lose any sleep over forgetting to shutoff the CVR in the mess of getting everyone to safety.
- cjbprime 3y agoI'm not an accident investigator and don't know what exactly would turn out to be useful, but I think changing your intuition for why we study the CVR away from "because there might have been a large pilot error" to "so that we can learn more about how pilots react to emergencies with a goal of seeing if we can come up with process improvements" may help. If there was some aspect of the response that was not perfect, we could develop training on it for other pilots, right?
- hinkley 3y agoThe piece of hardware that was chosen for the avionics-adjacent software I was working on was chosen before any software was written, which was 3 years before the plane was 'supposed' to fly, and 5 years before anyone sane expected it to be in service. Irritatingly, they didn't even pick the top-of-the-line machine from the vendor at that time. They picked a middling one. And then put an LTS OS version on it that didn't fully support the motherboard chipset. I spent way, way too much time an energy trying to get the software to run on the sort of timescales necessary. It took me months to get anyone to let me talk to the vendor in order to sort out the fact that the storage was being run in legacy PATA mode, reducing our IO throughput by an order of magnitude and the application throughput by about a third. Ten minutes on the phone and I got them to agree to give us a patch that aliased the chipset to one it was backward compatible with, that was actually supported by the OS. But they really wanted us to take the never version of the OS that didn't have this problem. That's not even the most hard-ware crippled I'd ever been, but it was top three.
- WalterBright 3y agoThey should also have a video recorder on a 2 hour loop. Many difficult investigations would have been easy if the investigators could see what the instruments were showing and what the crew was doing. And even, who exactly was in the pilot's seat!