Something I’ve wondered about, Who actually “owns” the black box from an aircraft?
In the case of the San Francisco crash, would the airline be able to keep the investigators from accessing it if they thought there was some chance that it proved some sort of negligence on their pilots and wanted to limit their liability?
Would Boeing be allowed insert something in their contract with customers retaining ownership of the black box?
Or maybe the FAA has say in this , but how would that apply to foreign airplanes?
The box probably belongs to the airline, but a simple search warrant takes care of any company that doesn’t want to turn it over to the NTSB. For that matter, I doubt any company people are allowed within 100 yeards of a crash, at any time. As for foreign airlines… tough. Let them sue…after the fact. I’m sure the various treaties cover things like this.
If any airline tried to pull this kind of stuff, then you can be sure that the FAA’s response would be to revoke the airline’s permission to fly in the USA. In other words, it’s pretty irrelevant who actually owns the box; the airline will play nice simply because the repercussions would be horrendous.
Duckster, that doesn’t 100% apply because the airline could have a fully working, compliant black box and just refuse to hand it over to authorities after an incident.
But yeah, no doubt the FAA wouldn’t have to look very long to find some way to revoke their certificate. “Hand over the box, or your company is out the $2,000,000/day of lost revenue.” It’d be settled in minutes, not days.
And I don’t think representatives of the airline are the ones combing through an incident site looking for evidence of any type. I am pretty sure they’re either NTSB (or other national flight safety agency) investigators or first responders.
How funny (not “ha ha ha funny”; “wtf funny”) would it look if some random flunky from the airline showed up on site and frantically rummaged around for the recorders, only to hide them under his jacket and try to sneak them away?
In practice, there isn’t any way for the airline to refuse to turn the recorders over. They don’t possess them.
Issues with the chain of custody of the black boxes have occurred in more minor accidents. The airline certainly does possess them, and if the plane is still intact, it is the airline’s responsibility to turn them over to investigators.
Recently American Airlines got into a little trouble for mishandling the data recorder after a no-injuries, no-damage runway overrun in Jackson Hole.
But why do people, read media, call flight recorders black boxes in the first place? In my world a black box is a logical problem where you try to deduce what happens inside by evaluating the output from different inputs.
The origin of the term “black box” for flight voice and data recorders isn’t clear. Some say it’s because the devices are mysterious boxes that just record stuff and most people don’t know (or care) how they work. Others say it is because the devices used optical film recording originally and the inside of the box had to be kept dark (black). Some of the early ones were actually black as well.
Good point; hadn’t considered the “not smoking wreckage” kind of incident, and that kind does present the opportunity for the aircraft operator to interfere with evidence-gathering.
That article states that the airline is barred from participating any further in the investigation. But they didn’t try to retain possession of the recorders, only accessed one of them before turning it over to the NTSB. So the question of an airline attempting to supress recorder evidence, and refusing to turn it over to the Board, isn’t quite answered yet.
I speculate that it would wind up involving the courts, before it’s all over with.
