[belltaco]

>The CVR was downloaded successfully; however, it was determined that the audio from the accident flight had been overwritten. The CVR circuit breaker had not been manually deactivated after the airplane landed following the accident in time to preserve the accident flight recording

In addition to local storage, why isn't the audio(along with location, altitude and some sensor information) also streamed using something like Starlink or Inmarsat to a secure location where you can store more data for cheaper and with more redundancy?

[fredoralive]

The current 2 hour limit (which is now 25 hours in Europe) is a legacy of privacy concerns. If pilots are concerned that their bosses would make a habit of yanking longer CVR units to micromanage what goes on in the cockpit (or using events several hours before an incident to somehow push blame onto the pilot for an it), they’d love the idea of it being beamed to a remote location. Yes, I’m sure there could be complicated byzantine cryptographic scheme that would theoretically solve it, but not sure they’d trust it.

There’s also bandwidth and satellite coverage not being magic of course.

[skywhopper]

This is an old system that works well and reliably for pretty much every incident. I’m not aware of another case of this sort of thing (relevant flight recorder data being overwritten) happening in recent years anyway. If you spend time constantly upgrading systems like this you’re asking for a higher failure rate, for very little gain.

That said, there’s a standard and reliable 25-hour flight voice recorder that solves this problem. But it’s only used outside the US. That’s a regulatory inertia situation and I suspect this incident will speed changes in this area.

However, finally, and particularly in relation to your proposal of streaming cockpit voice recordings to some cloud server. There is some resistance to this (and to longer recordings in general) from air crew on privacy grounds. The privacy issue is less about how much personal info is revealed in a crash situation and more about how easy it would be for a bad actor in management —or whatever operations group runs the audio storage—to listen in on conversations. And you can be sure this would happen if something like your system were implemented without the appropriate regulatory controls (and tbh even with them it would probably still happen).

[flutas]

> I’m not aware of another case of this sort of thing (relevant flight recorder data being overwritten) happening in recent years anyway.

Got me curious how often this happened.

Last example I can find of a CVR being overwritten and not just exploded/missing was in 2018 for an engine fire, similar to this where the flight had to emergency land shortly after take-off. Before that...well a lot of complete failures ("not operative at time of flight") but not many like this scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecovered_and_unusab...

[iamevn]

Here's one in 2017 that was recorded over because they didn't report until after another flight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759

[Kaxo]

In 2018 NTSB issued a report (https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...) listing 17 incidents where CVR was lost due to the recording not being turned off after the incident.

And it also lists 17 more incidents where something happened in a flight and it took more than 2 hours to land so data from the incident was lost.

[outworlder]

Starlink is a consumer system. Won't happen without a specialized product. Inmarsat is expensive. And we are talking about streaming audio from all planes currently in flight.

[belltaco]

> Starlink is a consumer system

Not true.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/starl...

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/06/fcc-approves-starlink-f...

[sv123]

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