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.
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.
Not just that, but all the tooling and manufacturing space needed is insanely expensive. The max mostly just needed tooling for the nacelles/pylons.