CVRs Are Ridiculously Outdated
There’s no practical reason to lose any cockpit voice recording.
When an Amtrak express train on its inaugural run from Seattle to Portland (ironically as competition to the dozens of daily flights between the two cities) piled onto a freeway on Monday it was known within hours that the train lacked critical safety equipment and was going 50 mph faster than the limit for the section of track it was on. CNN was littered with train experts who knew exactly what had happened and why and provided some diversion from the political tawdriness.
Although trains have come a long way since they were supplanted by aviation as the preferred method of long-distance transport, they are relatively simple devices compared to the Q400s, RJs and E175s flying overhead that this particular train was trying to lure some market share from. Yet the key information that paints a basic picture of the chain of events was both instantly available and, perhaps more important, publicly available.
In an age where we can find our phones, track everything from our pets to our suitcases in foot-by-foot detail and watch as people ring the doorbell no matter where we are, it seems strange that we don't have the faintest idea where MH370 went. And, although they flew the same plane the next day, we don't have a recording of what a couple of confused Air Canada pilots said to each other as they firewalled the engines on their A320 and sailed over the lineup of widebodies waiting on a taxiway for the runway the Airbus should have been aiming for.
The cockpit voice recorder uses digital media that records over itself in a two-hour loop. You can't even buy a digital media storage device that small at a convenience store these days. There's no reason for that limit other than it meets current regulations adopted when the recorders used magnetic tape loops. As such, "modern" recorders store their information inside expensive devices that have to withstand a crash.
Meanwhile, the same aircraft is capable of radiating all manner of systems management and diagnostic information to satellites, ground stations and company receivers in real time, with no need for hardened devices that need shielding from the effects of a catastrophic event.
So, it seems like a no-brainer that CVRs become CVTs, for Cockpit Voice Transmitters, and that the sounds they absorb be available instantly and virtually forever. Since there would be no need for them to survive a crash, they shouldn't be costly. Amazon is offering devices that will record your every utterance at home to its database for $29 this Christmas.
The point is that aviation gets so hidebound by rules necessitated by technology that no longer has any application (CVRs were originally wire recording devices, the predecessor of magnetic tape) that applying the old nonsensical rules becomes easier than allowing new technology to do a better job.
So, while we think Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, of San Francisco, should be commended for his push to ensure that CVR data be preserved whenever there's a significant safety incident, it doesn't go far enough.
There is no technical reason that we can't store the cockpit audio of every flight until the end of time but there may be some political hitches.
CVRs are not system or safety influencing devices. They operate independently without any impact on the aircraft or its crew and they're already an accepted part of cockpit culture. Scrapping the ancient technology and ethic it represents should be easy.
Maybe we should ask Alexa how to do it.
