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.'"

You'd think

[sleeponthemic (1253494)]

That video surveillance would be part of the mandate.

Re:

[petermgreen (876956)]

what for? They know what the pilot is doing to the controls from the flight data recorder (which is seperate from the cockpit voice recorder to increase the chances of recovering at least one of them). They know what the pilots were saying to each other from the cockpit voice recorder. Afaict that is all they really need to know to work out what the pilots did in the runup to the crash.

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[Dun Malg (230075)]

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 [risingup.com] 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

If they want

[amRadioHed (463061)]

more data from crashes it seems to me that the obvious solution would be to just ease up on aircraft maintenance requirements. Leave it to the government to always pick the hard way.

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[jd (1658)]

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

Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Khyber (864651)]

You drop any solid state device hard enough and it'll fail due to stress fractures in the silicon.

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[Stormwatch (703920)]

Agree. Break the magnetic tape, you can still put it together with a bit of adhesive tape. Break a flash memory, you have worthless pieces of silicon.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[AresTheImpaler (570208)]

I might be wrong, but the point is.. a SSD doesnt have any moving parts that will be "move" in an unwanted fashion once the airplane or just the blackbox is hit. This is specially true for all the vibrations that would go thru blackbox material. The black box itself is supposedly there to protect the disk and other instruments from a direct hit, but vibrations will still go thru.

Re:Solid State is vulnerable to damage as well

[Khyber (864651)]

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.

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[Detritus (11846)]

Package it properly and it can survive almost anything. The military has been using proximity fuses in artillery shells since World War II.

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[Eivind (15695)]

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)

Upgrades needed.

[engagebot (941678)]

I must first qualify this post by saying that I work at the L3 Aviation Recorders facility that builds all the black boxes. What people dont realize is that we dont just build the flight recorders, but every flight recorder has to come back to this facility to be taken apart and read too. You don't even know how many *old, old* flight recorders come in all the time from retired aircraft or downed aircraft, whatever. Some of the flight recorders out there in the wild are way way behind the new stuff that we're putting in aircraft being built now.

Question: why just record?

[martyb (196687)]

Here's a question that's been gnawing at me for a while... why is the "black box" just a recorder? I'd think of this question every time I heard that there's been an accident and the black box had not been found. OR, that they found the box but it was too badly damaged to make out all the data. Is this still a problem?

If a black box (BB) senses an anomalous event, why couldn't it transmit a [compressed] copy of the recorded data? Or, even better, besides recording it all, transmit all the data all the

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[ruinevil (852677)]

Quote [slashdot.org]

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 tr

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[Starker_Kull (896770)]

Actually, something very similiar to that is already done at many airlines. The data is downloaded at various intervals, and examined for any 'unusual' events - the pilots involved are contacted in a 'non-jeopardy' fashion and asked to explain why something occurred. It has already led to significant improvements in maintainance replacements, and highlighted a few non-optimal procedures that tend to put a crew in a worse place than they started.

The key is that it is non-jeopardy, otherwise the pilots w

We should try to find a way to built the plane out

[Joe The Dragon (967727)]

We should try to find a way to built the plane out of the stuff that the black box is made from.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[CrazyJim1 (809850)]

How did you get modded insightful instead of funny?

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[bluefoxlucid (723572)]

Don't be stupid. We build planes from thin pressed light-weight metals, while the black box uses heavy steel casing several inches thick. You think a 4 billion ton plane can get itself off the ground? No engine would accelerate it, much less fast enough.

Re:We should try to find a way to built the plane

[evilviper (135110)]

We should try to find a way to built the plane out of the stuff that the black box is made from.

Better yet, try to find a way to make humans out of stuff that can withstand a 900 MPH crash...

Did Giuliani join the FAA?

[teamhasnoi (554944)]

to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted.

9 / 11? Odd arbitrary range of numbers.

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[AJWM (19027)]

Would 10 +/- 1 make it clearer?

Realtime Streaming

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip? Why is the technology limited to making a recording crash-proof?

They should keep the crash-proof boxes, for events that stop the streaing before the recorder stops. But why should they have to always wait to investigate the data until after a little box, that could have been itself destroyed in the massive crash, be found amidst all the debris, scattered sometimes across dozens of miles of often inaccessible terrain? If the data is streamed live, they might also find the box sooner, if the box has a GPS that continues streaming after the box has landed somewhere.

This seems elementary. Why not do it already, now that both air flight and radio have been with us for over a century?

Re:Realtime Streaming

[Detritus (11846)]

For one thing, it would be horrendously expensive to develop and deploy a network of satellites and ground stations capable of handling a high-speed data feed from every commercial aircraft that's in operation. Black boxes are much more cost effective and reliable. They work in all weather and are insensitive to aspect ratios and loss of attitude control.

Finally

[ceroklis (1083863)]

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 (261584)]

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

Yeah, good luck with that.

[Mr. Roadkill (731328)]

Voice recorders must also use solid state technology instead of magnetic tape, which is vulnerable to damage and loss of reliability

Okay. Good luck with splicing together itty bitty fragments of flash memory chips. Good luck with pulling information out of flash memory chips that have been under a couple of miles of salt water, and had the briny deep seep in between the legs and the epoxy and into their inner goodness. I hope they've got all kinds of grinding machines designed to allow them to separate individual chips off busted boards and prepare them for reliable connection to special test jigs, because the chance of them being able to play back from a flight recorder that's just fallen from 40,000 feet must be pretty slim.

I'm not saying you couldn't build a solid-state flight recorder that could survive most conceivable crashes, but surely tape and solid-state should be viewed as complementary technologies - current, perhaps improved magnetic recorders for the current timeframes (so you've got at least the last half hour on something you can piece together and pull an analog signal off, if need be) and the whole flight on an ever-improving series of solid-state recorders that would have to consider mil-spec as a starting point for where they need to head.

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[DerekLyons (302214)]

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.

cockpit video

[blitz487 (606553)]

They'd do even better with recording cockpit video. Then they can see where the pilots are looking, and what they are doing, rather than having to guess it.

wide angle view

[supernova87a (532540)]

Maybe this is a little bit off topic, but I for one am quite grateful to live in a society where air safety is so well looked after and monitored. We really don't skimp (in general) on air safety, and take quite a rational view about how checking and maintaining planes, and training pilots actually contributes to preventing accidents.

This is far from the common attitude in some other places around the world. In some other countries, operating an "airline" is still a very seat-of-the-pants operation -- passengers are unrecorded, cargo is misloaded, pilots are bribed to take things they don't know about, etc. And if a plane were to crash, people would throw up their hands and say, "what can be done, these things just happen", or "it's God's will that accidents occur", or "why talk about it?". But here, we've been accustomed to understanding that there were tangible causes behind every accident, and if we could only see the moments before the crash (since often no one survives to tell us what happened), we might be able to prevent future accidents. This is an admirable thing that I am very grateful for.

The state of the technology and awareness of safety are so advanced that accidents have decreased so much in the US, that the NTSB/airlines, having fewer crashes to investigate, now analyze the data from normal flights, and look for patterns that suggest unsafe conditions -- and they change those unsafe conditions. see this article for example [nytimes.com]

Finally, just regarding some of the other points made here, I am not an expert, but I think it would be impractical to have a nonstop streaming black box. These recorders not only capture audio, but sub-second sampled data for dozens, if not scores of readings from the aircraft systems -- non stop. Multiply that by the number of planes in the sky, and it quickly becomes overwhelming I think. Most airplane data systems are at the text messaging level of bandwidth.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[engagebot (941678)]

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.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[tompaulco (629533)]

As is, a black box weights 25lbs or more easily...
It contains tons of instruments...
That IS quite impressive. Using black box material, I wonder if there is a way to make the plane weigh only a few thousand pounds while carrying hundreds of tons of cargo.

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[mabhatter654 (561290)]

like all good regulations though, they do many things very backwards. I've worked for a contractor too and many practices, while safe, are outright backwards given the leaps in technology. An iPhone and Wii controller are probably more advanced, and more reliable... not entirely fit for the job of a black box, but the direction it should be going... half the size and twice the function. The 50 year-old engineers that design this stuff are just plain out-of-touch with what technology can do now... flat out

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[eonlabs (921625)]

To be fair, my gamecube is dead. In its wake, I've been playing my super and regular nintendo.

I beg to argue that older technologies have stood the test of time compared to our modern works which last two years or less.
I would be far more interested in a black box that works reliably, even with some moderate internal hardware failures.

I should also note, the regular nintendo we've been using is split in half and missing a large chunk. The gamecube could be mistaken for new.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[hjf (703092)]

The worst airplane crash of an Argentine airplane was the Austral 2553 (Uruguay, 1997). The pitot tube (the little thingy that gives you the speed of the aircraft) failed (it froze, and the alarms failed due to lack of maintenance), and the pilots just keep pushing the gas. The plane hit the ground, perpendicular, at 1200kph. The black box survived: The speed indicator jumped from 300kph to 800kph in 3 seconds (sudden defrost of the pitot tube).

Anyone who says any kind of consumer electronics device is going to work after hitting the ground at 1200kph, obviously has no idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austral_L%C3%ADneas_A%C3%A9reas_Flight_2553 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Black_box.aeroplane.JPG [wikipedia.org]

Re:It sounds so easy but

[Lumpy (12016)]

and the pilots just keep pushing the gas. The plane hit the ground, perpendicular, at 1200kph.

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.

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[bcattwoo (737354)]

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.

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[hjf (703092)]

At the time, the company was in a severe debt (still is but they're much better now, they ordered a couple A380's). Pilots received no training, no simulator, and were forced to work in "if you don't fly, you're fired" conditions. The commercial aviation in Argentina was (and I think it still is) under Argentine Air Force regulations, one of the most corrupt forces. Airports were privatized from the airline desks to the door, but behind that it was still the same. Traffic control wasn't privatized: we have

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[lintux (125434)]

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

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[Dun Malg (230075)]

So, basically this is what I imagined. I trust you can open that box and replace the tape recorder and the rest of the device will function well. That should be cheap and easy, unless all of the innards are closely guarded company secrets. If that's the case, and the instrumentation recording also has to be replaced, your company has the ability to rape the flying public that I worried about.

Christ almighty, people like you drive me out of my mind. A fucking iPod (regardless of the box it's wrapped in) can't survive a 500mph impact with submerged bedrock [wikipedia.org], followed by being pummeled by the entire rest of the plane accordioning and disintegrating on top of it. You come up with a way to make a $5 chinese MP3 recorder survive that, and you'll make a fucking mint. Aircraft "black boxes" have two jobs: 1) the easy job, which is recording the data, and 2) the very hard job, which is surviving the cra

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[SlashWombat (1227578)]

I recently worked on a data recorder for trains. (no voice, but train data + GPS co-ords, etc) are all stored on a CF card which is encased in a large aluminium block surounded by a good insulator, then encased in a heavy steel box, all inside a very strong case ...)

It certainly survived all the standard test (like puncture, high temperatures for extended time periods, etc).

So, yes, this is very easy to do in this day and age. (Done again, it would undoubtedly be better to use SD cards, as these are e

Re:It sounds so easy but

[rabiddeity (941737)]

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.

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[garett_spencley (193892)]

"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."

No problem. We'll just tell them that CowboyNeil shot it down.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[TubeSteak (669689)]

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 [lightningdiversion.com] the Discovery show was talking about. AFAIK, in a properly maintained plane, lightning almost never goes anywhere near the electronics.

But they *do* fail

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

Black boxes often do fail.

It's a lot easier to reenforce a small robust item than a large fragile one. Smaller is inherently stronger because they have less stresses due to acceleration etc. F= m a

A small solidstate recorder with some accelerometers etc could likely be made a lot cheaper, smaller and tougher than the monsters of today.

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[CharlieG (34950)]

In reality, the only part that really matters is the memory, the rest is a luxury. First thing you do, make sure you use g-10 glass boards and ceramic package chips. Next. You talk to your ME, and he calls say, Dow Corning to talk about potting compounds. Depending on different electrical, cooling, fire and other needs, they pick out a potting compund. Of the top of my head, it's probably be one of the glass bead filled compounds, as I can't see a memory chip, or a dozen needed serious cooling capabili

Re:It sounds so easy but

[rabiddeity (941737)]

Smaller components are more susceptible to interference and voltage transients because they operate at lower voltages. You'll have to redesign the power supply to output a lower voltage, but realistically this also means that the original circuits for power conditioning won't work as well as they did on the old hardware. On a lightning strike, the circuit might let a 10V transient through which wouldn't harm the old analog tapes at all, but 10V spikes might be enough to glitch or erase modern SSD chips that operate at 3.3V or lower. Redundancy won't help you if your identical devices all get fried on a single voltage transient. The proper solution is to design a new circuit using high quality components and test rigorously, and that isn't cheap. The new parts needed to improve power conditioning also require more space, meaning that you gained some space from smaller media but lost some to power conditioning.

If you want to use multiple smaller tapes, consider the following. While improvements in technology have allowed us to make smaller tapes, they have also reduced the physical tolerances in the recorder. A head mashing against a tape isn't as disastrous as a hard drive head crash, but it still can't be good for the media. The tensile strength of the smaller tape would also have to be evaluated to make sure it doesn't self-destruct on sudden acceleration. Again, if one tape snaps under certain conditions a redundant one probably will snap too. Maybe the older tapes are more durable. Maybe they aren't. Without testing it's impossible to tell. Testing costs money.

I hope I don't have to explain why spinning platter hard drives are not a good idea on a flight recorder.

Give the original engineers a bit of credit. Those analog tapes might be stone-age and oversized, but they're time-tested and they work. The reluctance to replace them comes from years of experience saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" -- especially when lives hang in the balance. If we can design something that withstands impact better, then that's great, but we need to be very cautious not to introduce new flaws.

Re:It sounds so easy but

[AJWM (19027)]

A few thousand bucks for a piece of equipment on an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars is a pretty trivial amount. It probably costs more to change the color of the fabric on the seats.

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[petermgreen (876956)]

I don't think they ever used hard drives. Afaict they went straight from tape to flash.

The big problem I see with streaming the data off is keeping it working under adverse conditions. Afaict in a large proportion of crashes some kind of adverse weather conditions or unusually low flight or power failures or other things that are likely to screw up communications are involved.

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[Nullav (1053766)]

I'm assuming they're referring to how tape degrades over time with 'loss of reliability'. However, I am a bit confused as to how solid-state storage is much better in this situation, since torn tape can still be played while it would be somewhat difficult to recover from a trashed flash chip. (Though I'm sure this could be solved quite easily by recording to several SSDs at once.)

Re:Strict Laws

[wasted (94866)]

Or 11 minutes and 1 second, for that matter.
Why is there an upper limit to this range?

So the recorder does not record much data from after the crash over data from before the crash.