Wow. History hasn't been kind. As is often the case around limited-mindset thinking.
From TFA:
"civil authorities said that “Dr Warren’s instrument has little immediate direct use in civil aircraft.” The Royal Australian Air Force likewise decided that “such a device is not required—the recorder would yield more expletives than explanations.”
Well. No. Multiple air crashes across the world relied on recordings as a key part of their investigation. Especially when a plane lands in the Hudson, just to name one example.
This is very telling:
"Most damning was the Federation of Air Pilots, which declared that the device would be like “a spy flying alongside—no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening.”
History wasn't kind here either. Just try and take off in a jet from a commercial airliner without the various safety equipment installed. The insurance companies alone will try to eat you alive, let alone every other agency.
There's definitely a repeating theme around safety equipment and authority/authority figures. The ridicule at the start is definitely a common starting point. Seat belts and air bags were both ridiculous inventions. Then they weren't. Then they became required.
Quote from elsewhere and not necessarily about flight recorders:
"It has been said that any new idea must pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is subject to argument: third, it is accepted. The safety idea has reached the final stage. It is accepted." -- Earl B. Morgan, journal of Safety Engineering, 1917
I don't understand. You're saying that the purpose of cockpit voice recorders is not to improve aviation safety via allowing a thorough investigation of accidents? If there is any other purpose, I don't know what it would be.
Australia is also responsible for "black box" flight recorders, which are one of those things where it's really hard to appreciate in hindsight why we didn't mandate them much sooner.
You don't need to necessarily be looking for pilot error to want the recording. Maybe it picked up the sound of the plug separating and that could be useful. Maybe it records an alarm, a call from the cabin, whatever. Maybe the way they work the checklist for decompression reveals some problem that should lead to a change in the checklist. Maybe it corroborates or disagrees with the FDR.
Of course I think it's most likely that it wouldn't be that relevant in this particular case.
Aviation is safe because the participants all trust each other. Blanket recording for undefined future use undermines that trust. This has a chilling effect on communication. Crews will be reluctant to communicate with each other. The risk of a warrant being issued at all creates an adversarial relationship between crews and investigators. This is a horrible idea and suggesting it betrays a cliche misunderstanding of the domain that is the stereotype of modern technologists.
If you have that to add, I am pretty sure you don't have any formal experience with aviation.
Even the nuts and bolts that go on aircraft can cost >$100. The problems are not all bureaucratic, and I get HN's hate of bureaucracy but for life-and-death matters - I'd rather default to caution than move fast and break necks attitude of SV/Tech.
Just to give you an example, lookup the swissair in-flight entertainment fire incident. Tacking couple of screens and media server onto an existing plane should be fine right? turns out not really and 215 people paid the price of that decision with their lives.
Privacy aside, being watched does affect decision making.
If you think recording people at their jobs will make things safer, why not apply it for the least safe mode of transportation first - why doesn't the gov/NHTSA mandate a video and data recorder in your car and the police and insurance can take a look at it next time you crash to decide who/what caused it.
My knee-jerk reaction is "they should be recorded" so I write this to attempt to steel-man the alternative.
A core concept of safety is arriving at a root cause in an effort to continuously improve. This won't happen in an adversarial fact finding as the interests of the participants diverge instead of converge. Two key concepts here are Psychological Safety and Just Culture.
What could be adversarial about just recording the interview? While NTSB's argument for recording interviews is facially sound, it represents a change from previous practice. Further, it represents opening a collaborative and open fact-finding conversation to third parties who have adversarial interests. Key concepts here are "Don't talk to cops" [2] and Nothing to Hide [3]
It is ironic that the NTSB's interest in recording is in part driven by a lack of data caused by no-one at the airport pulling the Andon cord [4] at the time of the near miss. The cockpit voice recorders only record two hours. Since the flight continued to take off and flew for more than 2 hours, the voice data was lost. The NTSB seeks to record for "highest degree of accuracy, completeness, and efficiency" the pilots many days after the event based on their memory as a witness of themselves [4].
Extending to 25 hours is a lot different than extending it forever. Using “cheap” and “easy” recording devices is frankly reckless. Look around this comment section at the ignoramuses willing to throw SD cards at commercial airliners. Everyone’s an expert.
Yes, voice recorders should last long enough to capture everything that happens on a flight. But at the same time pilots should have protections to make them feel safe from retaliation.
Aviation safety is an incredible achievement that we as technologists should learn from. It’s not fertile ground for self-proclaimed “engineers” to piss their pet theories upon.
I am fairly certain NTSB flight incident investigators understand fully well the safety implication of integrating an AliExpress recorder in the avionics suite of an aircraft. And wouod hence oppose such an idea quite strongly.
This pilot with a popular youtube channel about aviation and air disasters has an video on the topic, if you want a pilot's perspective on something that as a techie seems obviously outdated in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMWZCuTQpds
At least the voice recorder is 2 hours instead of half an hour now. But watching those incident videos I've seen a couple that ended up being investigated but the pilots didn't pull the circuit breaker and the investigation was based on the flight recorder, specially in those cases where things end up fine.
As I argue above pilots already have an excellent safety record.
Have you considered what the extra stress of considering ones every word during a long and stressful day can do to someones concentration?
I mean many, the thoughts about what they said earlier this morning is bad enough even if it wasn't recorded.
We already record a couple of hours or so. If you want to record more, it is up to you to come up with data for how many more air traffic accidents we can solve and also to explain how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous.
I can't find it now, but there was a Reddit thread from a US flight instructor at the time of the China Eastern Airlines crash of 2022 who had previously trained pilots in China. He claimed the airline policy was to record cockpit audio of every single flight and have multiple people review that flight for anomalies. Any deviation from the standard procedure was logged and marked against the offending pilot. The pilots were extremely reluctant to act outside the guidelines of their training in a way that this person thought put safety at risk.
As you can imagine, this is not a situation that US pilots want to be subject to and they are probably right that safety would actually be made worse.
> 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?
There's other issues at play. Pilots hate the idea of more monitoring of the cockpit, and have been vocal in trying to prevent e.g. a video recording of the cockpit being part of the "black box", even though it would have helped to shed light on a lot of aviation incidents[1].
Indeed, the FAA has just proposed to start doing that for new aircraft. Same as Europe where this has been put in place for aircraft manufactured from 2021 onwards.
The problem in the US is that there has also been more disciplinary use of the recordings (by the company, not the NTSB). In Europe things are a bit more strictly regulated and there wasn't any resistance to the 25 hour change.
> In France, small aircraft like the Twin Otter were not required to have cockpit voice recorders, but Air Moorea had installed one anyway. This proved invaluable to investigators, so for the sake of future investigations, they recommended that all planes with capacity for 9 or more passengers be equipped with a CVR.
But earlier the author stated that the pilot
> uttered an expletive, the only word recorded on the cockpit voice recorder
So it doesn't quite follow how this crash caused the new regulations
Agreed. Hopefully, this will result in a requirement for "black boxes" or "flight recorders" for this type of recreational/tourist endeavour going forward. They aren't going to prevent the accident that just occurred, but they provide valuable data to prevent future accidents.
It kind of makes sense. If you had a high stakes job (human life, say a surgeon) and your boss wanted to record your every action, what would you think?
I think the FAA’s approach of “we do accident investigations so we learn, not to blame” went pretty far in making the idea more acceptable.
Airline pilots have strict protections on how the cockpit voice recorder information can be used; it's only a 30-minute loop, etc. Hardly the same as having every working day recorded permanently...
From TFA: "civil authorities said that “Dr Warren’s instrument has little immediate direct use in civil aircraft.” The Royal Australian Air Force likewise decided that “such a device is not required—the recorder would yield more expletives than explanations.”
Well. No. Multiple air crashes across the world relied on recordings as a key part of their investigation. Especially when a plane lands in the Hudson, just to name one example.
This is very telling:
"Most damning was the Federation of Air Pilots, which declared that the device would be like “a spy flying alongside—no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening.”
History wasn't kind here either. Just try and take off in a jet from a commercial airliner without the various safety equipment installed. The insurance companies alone will try to eat you alive, let alone every other agency.
There's definitely a repeating theme around safety equipment and authority/authority figures. The ridicule at the start is definitely a common starting point. Seat belts and air bags were both ridiculous inventions. Then they weren't. Then they became required.
Quote from elsewhere and not necessarily about flight recorders: "It has been said that any new idea must pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is subject to argument: third, it is accepted. The safety idea has reached the final stage. It is accepted." -- Earl B. Morgan, journal of Safety Engineering, 1917
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