FAA Seeks to Increase Recording Time of CVRs/FDRs

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

This isn't really a Poli thing, more of a tech thing and I hear we have some flyers about.

Cockpit voice recordings get erased after some close calls. The FAA will try to fix that​

Federal officials say they will give investigators a better tool for understanding accidents and close calls between planes.


With storage advances, why are they still using tape and only two hours? They want to go to 25 hours, but that still seems limited. Might be OK for CVRs, but at least for the FDR, why not store as much as possible to go back and see how long a problem might have been present?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm surprised they are as short as they are. I've been watching lot of flight incident/crash investigation videos on Youtube and it happens often where they don't have enough recording to get a full picture, as sometimes something that happened very early during the flight could be useful.

Can't just use any storage format though as it needs to survive high impact and high heat and also be partially recoverable if it does get damaged. That's probably why they use tape, and I assume it's also analog, so that makes the physical size of it bigger and the bigger you go, the harder it is to protect. This sounds like it could be a fun engineering project for a university, to come up with a better black box.