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Comment by polpo | Hacker News Reader

Given that Boeing currently has to ship planes to Europe with 25 hours of recording capacity, and that this plane is only a few months old, I'd guess it already has 25 hours of capacity and it's artificially limited to 2 because it was shipped to the US, due to the opposition from pilot's unions.

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Not necessarily, could very well be that US planes are shipped without 25 hours of recording capacity.

Don't be so dense. Even if that is the case, it it probably is not, there exists a certified flight recorder module with 25h capacity. They should not have to go through any 'soup to nuts' certification process for a new module with this capacity. They could simply take the current module they use in europe, give it a quick once over ( assuming european standards are at least as strict as american standards.. which i'm sure they are ) and say 'yup, buy and install those in all new craft'.

Aircraft certification is, well, peculiar. And believe me, modifying a delivered aircraft is nowhere near as easy as "install that certified box", because said box has to be compatible with the aircraft you want to install it on.

And as I said, no idea how US-only aircraft differ, hardware and software wise, from their European airspace brethren. Do no, it is propably not as easy as going into maintenance mode and set a toghle from 2 to 25 hours on the voice recorder firmware.

any 737 in europe uses such a module as it is required.

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