I just had a somewhat bizarre and creepy thought:
What if they find the cockpit recorder from the missing airplane, play the tape, and hear------------nothing?
The black box is just a simple audio tape on a continuous half-hour loop , which records anything the pilots say to each other. But if the plane flew on autopilot for several hours after the fire/explosion/suicide/whatever happened…it will just be recording a silent cockpit.
(yeah, I know , there are two black boxes, one of which is the flight data recorder, and should provide valuable info–if they ever find it.)
But suppose the only thing they find is the cockpit voice recorder—How many new conspiracy theories will be spawned? And how long will it take for the “history” channel to make a cheesy movie about them?
Well, there’s already a lot of speculation that perhaps the plane was flown way out to sea by a suicidal pilot or unknown hijacker(s) specifically in order to overwrite the CVR data (which is 2 hours these days, BTW). I think a blank recorder is consistent with most of the leading theories, so if somehow only the CVR was recovered and not the data recorder or any definitive physical evidence, it wouldn’t change much from where we are now. Although I’m also not sure if it’s something like a regular computer hard drive where there’s a chance they’ll be able to recover some of the overwritten data.
Gee, sorry if I offended you. But the other thread is 26 pages long so far.
(And besides, I thought this thread might go off on the creepy consipiracy side, and I didnt want to distract the other thread, which I thought was in GQ anyway, till you mentioned it :). )
(We really need color code system, with each forum a different background color, or something.)
Although I can’t come up with a reasonable scenario for what happened to this flight (and I’ve gone over it hundreds of times in my head), personally I would be very surprised if the Cockpit Voice Recorder registers any voices for the last two hours of flight.
The Flight Data Recorder should be more useful as it will have recorded pilot inputs, which hopefully will tell us what actions were deliberate.
More over, what faults , if any, occurred.
Or if the pilots tried stuff that seem to indicate a fault (even if none are recorded.)
Back to the voice recoder… a suicidal pilot may have kept his final goodbyes until the last two hours… knowing that would be heard by those left alive at some stage.
If we find the black box, we’ve found the plane, and there may be evidence of what happened from it’s condition. We could see signs of a fire, possibly if bodies are found soon enough we may be able to determine the cause of death. But it’s still possible that if this was suicide by pilot we won’t ever know. Count on the pilot being blamed if there’s no evidence of any other cause.
Far creepier would be if it were to have no sound except for the desperate shouting and banging on the cockpit door from the doomed passengers and cabin crew.
Now that’s a plot for Rod Serling.!! Perfect for a 1962 black and white TV screen.
(or, for a 70’s movie …just add something about the Bermuda Triangle, and you’ve got a blockbuster!)
When we’ve got DVRs that can record over 100 hours of HD video, why is the voice recorder limited to 2 hours? Seems to me it should record everything from liftoff to crash, so why not design it to last as long as the fuel does?
The cost of consumer hard drive storage and “cannot ever fail ever even if in a crash at hundreds of miles per hour and then left under water for years” storage are not comparable.
I don’t know if I buy this for an excuse. What % of the plane’s cost is in the black boxes? If there are technical reasons why you can’t build a voice recorder that last 6 hours, install 3 that last 2 hours each. Box 1 is on from taxiway to 2 hours in, box 2 kicks in for 2 hours, then box 3. Easy peasy.
There are a lot of potential improvements that can be made to black boxes and other flight data systems. However, all of them cost money, and in this case money is limited in a self-regulating supply. Expenditures of money for airline safety will tend to prioritize preventing crashes over analyzing the ones that happen, and very rarely are we unable to analyze the cause of a crash because of the limits of the technology in use today. So any additional money spent should go into prevention instead of post mortems. Anyway, that’s the argument. I don’t know if there are realistic preventive measure that could be taken for the same or less cost, or that spending the money on better data collection would significantly delay or prevent preventive measures.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. Just that the specs of my DVR are not sufficient grounds for concluding that it can or should be done. Another thing to keep in mind is that the 777 design began in the 80’s and the missing plane itself was manufactured in 2002.
You are talking about an industry where we are encouraged to shut down an engine while taxiing in to our bay because it might save $10 in fuel. Where the annual profit can be expressed as cents per passenger. If it costs money and there is no legal requirement for it then it probably won’t get done.
To get a longer recording time you need the authorities to mandate it and they will only do that if there is a significant perceived benefit. Aside from MH370 the vast majority of accident investigations are not hindered by a lack of CVR recording time.
The bigger question is really how often is there a need for MORE than 2 hours of cockpit voice recorder information? I mean, it seems to me that the vast, vast majority of air incidents don’t need 2 hours of cockpit voice recordings; in a lot of cases 20 minutes is more than enough.
Sure in this one case, it would be helpful, but it’s almost certainly not cost-effective to put longer CVRs in planes to account for the vanishingly small chance that something like this would happen.
Look at it this way: The world sees something like 9 million scheduled flights a year, and in 2012, 2013 and 2014, we’ve seen 27 incidents, none of which were as mysterious as MH 370 (which is one of the 27, BTW).
With that kind of record, it would hardly pay to increase the cost and capability of the CVRs and FDRs on the planes, since they clearly are adequate for the vast majority of crashes.