FAA Mandates Major Aircraft "Black Box" Upgrade

coondoggie writes "Earlier this week the FAA mandated upgrades and updates to aircraft voice and data recorders within the US. The goal of the updates: to assist future investigations with 'more and better data' from accidents and incidents. The 'mandate means manufacturers such as Honeywell and L-3 Communications as well as operators of airplanes and helicopters with 10 or more seats, must employ voice recorders, also known as black boxes, that capture the last two hours of cockpit audio instead of the current 15 to 30 minutes. The new rules also require an independent backup power source for the voice recorders to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted. Voice recorders also must use solid state technology instead of magnetic tape, which is vulnerable to damage and loss of reliability.'"

Comments

Re:It sounds so easy but

[engagebot]

I happen to work at the L3 Communications facility that builds the flight recorders in Sarasota, Fl. Trust me, there's a lot more to a flight recorder than just an ipod in a big orange case. As is, a black box weights 25lbs or more easily. Do you know what kind of force it has to be able to withstand and come out unscathed? Second of all, its not just a storage medium. It contains tons of instruments that actually measure certain parameters about the flight too.

Requires massive acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do some research first. "Currently, EUROCAE specifies that a recorder must be able to withstand an acceleration of 3400 g (33 km/s) for 6.5 milliseconds." To test the armor and memory, manufacturers test them by firing them out of a calibrated cannon (compressed air, not gunpowder) into a hard surface.

They also survive crush tests, penetration tests (IIRC, 1/4" steel dowel on a 500lb weight dropped 10' on all six faces), short term high intensity heat (propane flame "goosed" with oxygen to make it hot enough), long term moderate (600^C?) heat soak, and pressurized seawater immersion (I forgot the equivalent depth, way further than I would care to dive).

On the Wikipedia pictures, the circular/semi-circular painted part is the armor (with the rectangular versions, the armor is inside the shell). The silvery cylinder on the near end is an underwater locating beacon "pinger".

A magnetic media recorder would not survive what the solid state recorders survive. The old metal foil scribe recorders would probably survive but don't record many signals nor very accurately.

Finally

[ceroklis]

This was one of the recommendations issued by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada following the crash of Swissair Flight 111. I'm glad they finally implemented that. To recap: the flight recorders in that flight lost power 6 minutes before impact, which necessitated a very costly reconstruction of a portion of the aircraft.

In any case I never understood why these recorders weren't required to have a battery backup from the beginning. Seems pretty idiotic since accidents involving loss of power are not hard to imagine. Furthermore devices like card access systems and elevators have had battery backups for years.

Summary forgot an important detail

[the pickle]

From TFA:

"These provisions affect new aircraft manufactured after March 7, 2010."

This won't affect a single new aircraft for two years unless Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, and Embraer decide to do it on their own, and it does NOT apply to the existing fleet of transport category aircraft at all (i.e., retrofits are not required).

p

Re:It sounds so easy but

[TubeSteak]

But the flight recorder has to withstand the aircraft getting struck by lightning repeatedly, and still continue to function. Discovery Channel had a show that included a segment about how planes survive lightning strikes.

Long story short: Lightning travels along either the aluminum skin or special strips stuck to any non-metallic surfaces and continues on its way without damaging anything.

These are the type of strips the Discovery show was talking about. AFAIK, in a properly maintained plane, lightning almost never goes anywhere near the electronics.

Re:Question: why just record?

[ruinevil]

Quote One thing I remember from an ACM meeting was that radio transmissions take a lot of power compared to getting data and storing to memory. This was from team who used to check the soil moisture and temperature around campus using stakes filled with a battery for some purpose or other. So the blackbox would need a lot more power to survive those 9 to 11 minutes, while transmitting voices to where ever. You can't get all the radio waves from every American plane to Florida anyways. You'd need some powerful transmitters.

Re:Yeah, good luck with that.

[DerekLyons]

Okay. Good luck with splicing together itty bitty fragments of flash memory chips.

And you think the FAA doesn't know the potential problems and hasn't been working on them for years? These devices have been under development for around thirty years and have been commercially available (and certified by the FAA) for over a decade now.
 
The FAA didn't just make this decision out of the blue you know.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[lintux]

Yeah. :-) AFAIK they're easier to find between smoking pieces of airplane if it's orange.

Re:If they want

[jd]

One airline was recently busted for ignoring those regulations for many years. The airlines are clearly doing their best to supply the data regardless.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Eivind]

True. But "hard enough" is subject to the packaging. Package a chip in 3 inches of elastic-but-hard epoxy, and package that clumb of epoxy in half an inch of stainless steel, and you'll find that the "hard enough" dropping, needed to fracture the silicon, is much MUCH more than the terminal velocity of same (i.e. it'll likely survive a freefall from ANY height)

Re:It sounds so easy but

[bcattwoo]

as a amateur pilot it blows my mind that a commercial pilot would freak out about such a failure and continue to throttle up. You have a large number of other indicators you can use. Even in pitch black night and thick fog you have some indicators they teach you in flight school to make it so you dont hit the ground at full throttle.
You need to read the wikipedia link. The GP summary of the events is somewhat misleading. They didn't just throttle up and drill into the ground under control. The pilots believed they were at risk of stalling and deployed the slats. They were in fact going much too fast and one of the slats was ripped off the plane leading to a loss of control. Compounding the problem was that an alarm that was supposed to indicate a frozen pitot tube failed to go off.

Re:Not really

[Dun Malg]

What [if] the instruments were showing the pilot was pushing forward on the stick, but the video shows he was pulling back? Clear sign were the problem was, but your blackbox would never show it. Seriously, you need to read up on the 88 data points these things record. The FDR records both the control input positions* and the control surface positions**. Really, essentially everything that affects the craft's flight is recorded. There isn't anything for a camera to see!

* FAA regs Sec 121.344, parts 12, 13, 14
** as above, parts 15 16 17