IT'S BEEN MORE than three years since Malasiyan Airlines Flight 370 vanished, and after spending $150 million and scouring a huge chunk of the Indian Ocean, the international search effort has turned up just a few scraps of metal. It now seems likely investigators will never find the bulk of the wreckage nor the Boeing 777's black boxes, and as a result will never really know why it went down, or how to prevent it happening again.
Airbus says it has a solution: deployable flight data recorders. On large planes that frequently fly over water or remote areas, the European aircraft manufacturer will install a second, redundant black box near the rear of the fuselage, with a mechanical ejection system.
If the plane crashes into the ocean, the recorder will pop out to safety, floating and pinging away with an emergency locator transmitter, to help rescue teams find it and its valuable testimony about what went wrong. The ejection function is just one feature of Airbus' new black boxes (which are actually fluorescent orange), which are smaller and more capable than the current generation, able to record 25 hours of cockpit voice and data, up from the current two hours.
The recorder will only eject in the event of “major structural deformation” or submersion in six feet of water, which should reassure airlines that it won’t accidentally deploy in heavy turbulence or on hard landings. And the spring loaded mechanical system will be more palatable than earlier proposals for an explosive ejection system.
“The more digitized the airplane becomes, the more valuable that information is,” says air safety specialist, Christine Negroni, author of The Crash Detectives, Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters. She followed the search for MH370 in Malaysia, and says finding a data recorder would have made all the difference. “We would have had much faster and more specific knowledge, and a faster recovery to start picking stuff up. Now we may never know what happened.”
Deployable recorders would also have made life far easier for investigators after the Air France Flight 447 crash, in 2009. The Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic, killing 228 people. It took nearly two years to find and recover the black boxes—under 14,000 feet of ocean—which confirmed human error caused the crash, after the computer autopilot unexpectedly disconnected.
Recording 25 hours of data is a big help too, giving investigators much more information to work with. “People think the accident happens within minutes, that is not true,” says Negroni. Crashes are rarely simple, they’re usually the result of compounding factors that can start hours earlier, perhaps during maintenance, or even the previous flight.
After the loss of MH370, the International Civil Aviation Authority adopted a new standard requiring a plane to be capable of reporting its position at least every 15 minutes. In an emergency situation, that steps up to every minute. Plane makers are also investigating continual flight data reporting and using satellites to bounce info on a range of parameters back to an airline’s control center. But satellite uplinks, even if they’re high bandwidth, won’t replace the need for onboard recorders which monitor almost 100 sensors, computer inputs, switch positions, and flap locations, as well as a continual recording of voices through the pilots’ headsets and a cockpit microphone.
And even if all that data could be uploaded, duplicating it is even better. “I keep all my data in the cloud, but you can bet your butt I also have a portable hard drive,” says Negroni. In an industry reliant on redundancy for safety, wearing a belt and suspenders is a good thing.
The new recorders will be available in 2019, starting on the A350 jet and extending across the Airbus range from there. Hopefully, they’ll never be needed, but they’ll be there, just in case.
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