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

[rabiddeity]

The difference between a $40 mp3 player and a flight recorder is that the flight recorder must be engineered to never fail, ever. If you plug the mp3 player into an outlet to recharge and a power surge hits, it will get fried. You expect that. You can buy another one. But the flight recorder has to withstand the aircraft getting struck by lightning repeatedly, and still continue to function.

In addition, every component must survive the severe stresses involved in a plane crash. The severe acceleration can cause large components to get ripped off their solder points. The device will likely be cooked to several hundred degrees as the plane burns around it, so all the components need to survive that (electrolytic capacitors will explode well before that). Heck, if the plane spontaneously breaks apart on a trans-Pacific flight, the box gets cooled to the outside air temperature of around -50 C before slamming into the ocean at high speed. Let's see your music player take that and survive. And I hope whatever software running the thing wrote the data out cleanly before everything went to hell, because if any of those stresses caused a hardware glitch that overwrites or erases the log, you get to tell the FAA that you really don't know why that plane crashed. Oops.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Khyber]

The point is that those vibrations you mention would destroy the solid state storage, thus rendering the data absolutely useless and null. True that tape drive motors would be severely affected unless the whole unit had a gyro stabilizer (which I think some models do) but solid state would shatter upon impact. You rarely find working electronic devices after a plane crash, except for military ones.