The Federal Aviation Administration of the Department of Transportation of the United States is requesting your input pertaining to its proposed trade regulation rule entitled 25-Hour Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) Requirement, New Aircraft Production, which would extend the amount of time that a cockpit voice recorder captures all audio transmissions and sounds in the cockpit aboard an airplane from two hours to 25 hours…
Rule on Extending Cockpit Voice Recorder Time: Your Input is Requested
…but the deadline for you to post your comments — or mail them in, if you prefer — will be 60 days after Monday, December 4, 2023, when the proposed rule is scheduled to publish in the Federal Register.
If it is successfully passed, the new requirement will only apply to aircraft that is newly manufactured. Existing cockpit voice recorders will not be affected by this new ruling.
“This rule will give us substantially more data to identify the causes of incidents and help prevent them in the future,” Mike Whitaker — who is the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration — is quoted as saying in this official press release. The voices of the pilots and noises from the engines are included in the sounds that are captured by the cockpit voice recorder, which is also colloquially known as a “black box”.
“The FAA pledged to take action on the issue following the Safety Summit in March 2023 during which more than 200 safety leaders met to discuss ways to enhance flight safety”, according to the aforementioned press release. “This rule would align with regulations set by the International Civil Aviation Organization and European Union Aviation Safety Agency.”
Final Boarding Call
The last fatal commercial airplane crash in the United States occurred back in 2009 in Clarence Center in New York, as a Bombardier Q400 airplane crashed into a private house during its final descent into Buffalo Niagara International Airport on Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 10:17 in the evening Eastern Standard Time. The airplane operated as Continental Airlines flight 3407, which was officially a Continental Connection flight by a regional airline called Colgan Air as a codeshare flight. None of the 44 passengers and five members of the flight crew survived. One person who was inside of the house at the time of the crash — which was attributed to errors on the part of the pilots — was killed as well.
Although I am a proponent for ensuring that air travel is as safe as reasonably possible, I do wonder why the call to extend the recording time of cockpit voice recorders is being considered now — almost 15 years after the last fatal commercial airplane crash in the United States…
Photograph ©2017 by Brian Cohen.
