Brett Fibbs/AFP/Getty Images
On March 12, 2024, a LATAM Airlines Boeing 787 Dream suddenly lost altitude during a flight the previous day and fell heavily, injuring dozens of frightened travelers on the tarmac at Auckland International Airport in Auckland. You can see the liner machine.
CNN
—
Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner has an umbilical cord extending from its tail, allowing for quick play-by-play of almost any flight function.
Data, totaling more than 1,000 parameters, is quickly stored electronically in the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). This is one of the so-called black boxes that, according to aviation safety investigators, yield important facts when piecing together the accident. A plane crash on LATAM Airlines Flight 800 earlier this week left 50 people injured.
FDR and cockpit voice recorders from the Latin America flight, relayed by passengers interviewed by CNN, prove or refute the pilot’s initial account that the cockpit display momentarily went out and the pilot lost control of the plane. It should provide evidence. It could also tell if the yoke was pushed forward and the plane descended rapidly. In a scenario reported by the Wall Street Journal, which investigators are investigating, the flight attendant may have hit the switch while serving food to the pilot.
“There’s no way this is going to be a mystery,” said Peter Goertz, who led the investigation as executive director of the National Transportation Safety Board and is now an aviation analyst for CNN. “The recorder tells you what happened, whether something started or not.”
Regardless of what the FDR shows, the contents of the orange steel box with reflective tape typically attached to the back of a plane to reduce the risk of damage in a crash are It has proven to be extremely important in airplane research.
In 2015, investigators used the FDR to conclude that the pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 intentionally crashed the plane into the mountain, ruling out the possibility of the aircraft malfunctioning. FDR recorded his 600 parameters on a modern memory card, and investigators extracted the data despite being exposed to extreme temperatures during the crash.
Advanced laboratories, such as those run by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and equivalent agencies in France, Australia, and the United Kingdom, can reconstruct even a corrupted memory card and input it into the cockpit voice recorder. You can arrange the recorded audio and data side by side. The bright orange color and locator beacon on the container housing the recorder will help searchers locate it. Goeltz said equipment found underwater is typically taken to an underwater laboratory before being carefully dried.
One of Boeing’s newest aircraft, the 787 Dreamliner, inputs data into its flight data recorder through a system called the Common Data Network. Some liken this to the human body’s central nervous system. It first flew in 2009 and used then-new data transfer technology.
US regulations specify approximately 90 parameters that must be entered into the black box. The list includes each engine’s thrust, temperature, flap settings, and airplane direction. International Civil Aviation Organization standards further specify how often and in detail data must be captured. For example, altitude is recorded four times per second and with an accuracy of 0.5 degrees.
Kathleen Bangs, a former pilot and spokeswoman for aviation tracking site FlightAware, said data now includes “every parameter imaginable, like notes on a sheet of music.” “Once you collect all the data and put it all together to create this score, only then will you get the whole picture.”
But black boxes aren’t the only tools investigators have. Many components of modern aircraft, such as engines, also contain computer chips that track detailed data.
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is an aircraft instrument that transmits real-time data, including the aircraft’s location. The Federal Aviation Administration used this data to track every flight of Boeing’s 737 Max after grounding it at the end of 2020.
Data is also transmitted to airlines using the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). ACARS uses radio waves and satellite links to transmit automatically and manually entered messages between airlines and aircraft.
Some aircraft also have quick access recorders (QARs) that are not as hardened as the FDR, but track the same data. QAR can be easily connected to a laptop, allowing airline employees to download airplane performance information for analysis.
But it wasn’t always like this.
When United Airlines Flight 585 crashed just before landing in March 1991, FDR had five data points: direction, speed, altitude, gravitational acceleration, and whether the radio microphone was set to transmit. . Three years later, when US Air Flight 427 crashed near Pittsburgh, FDR recorded 11 parameters.
“If these airplanes were equipped with FDRs with additional parameters, that information would undoubtedly reveal important control surface movements and their causes, as well as other airplane systems that may have contributed to the airplane’s loss of control. “The condition could have been quickly identified,” the NTSB said. The 1999 report mentions these two crashes. “Thus, investigators could have more quickly ruled out certain factors and focused on other areas if warranted.”
The NTSB recommended that regulators tighten the requirements, which were eventually implemented in the early 2000s.
Aircraft cockpits may one day be equipped with a new generation of recording equipment: video cameras. The NTSB called for cameras that could help investigators understand the moments immediately before the incident. Some unions oppose the cameras, saying there are more effective, less invasive ways to get enough data. U.S. lawmakers abandoned plans to include video cameras in cockpits when crafting sweeping FAA legislation this year.
