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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

>Debate about whether to adopt the longer recording standard weighs considerations about cost and privacy implications against safety.

>The U.S. FAA has previously rejected the NTSB's call for mandating the retrofitting aircraft with new cockpit voice recorders, saying the costs would be significant at $741 million versus $196 million under incremental upgrades it proposed.

>Pilots have also opposed the move, with the union representing pilots for air-freight company Atlas Air telling the FAA the longer recordings would be an invasion of worker privacy.

Whether or not a "technical barrier" exists is a non-sequitur. Just because you can get a $10 audio recorder on aliexpress that records 200 hours, doesn't mean it takes $10 to implement this change per plane.

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It doesn't need to be a cheap aliexpress recorder. Couldn't they just drop in whichever 25hr recorder is used in Europe? Already tested and probably installed in the same type of plane

> Whether or not a "technical barrier" exists is a non-sequitur. Just because you can get a $10 audio recorder on aliexpress that records 200 hours, doesn't mean it takes $10 to implement this change per plane.

I bet many investigators would be very happy with the aliexpress implementation ...

In this case the aliexpress implementation would have worked, but not in cases where the aircraft is literally pulverized on impact, like in the 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302 - "The aircraft impacted the ground at nearly 700 miles per hour (610 kn; 1,100 km/h) [...] Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were recovered from the crash site on 11 March.")

You've constructed a false dichotomy. You can have the current 2-hour system and a cheap 24-hour system at the same time.

Then you can gradually harden the new addon. This could be a way to make it all even more expensive.

I hope you don't design avionic systems, or any other safety critical piece of hard or software...

Hardware is hard. There are so many more things that can go wrong.

If your cheap 24-hour system decides to self-immolate, it might be the cause of the incident rather than just help determine what the cause was.

You can make up 1000 different potential failure modes to try and make yourself feel smart.

And you can ignore those failure modes and kill hundreds of people at a time.

Did you conduct the extensive study into all the possible failure modes if we allow pilots to wear smart watches? Or cork-soled shoes?

It is appropriate to use caution and care. You are right about that. It is obstructionist to demand every possible mode of failure be used as an excuse to block progress. It is possible to use flaky hardware that will increase risk. But it isn't that hard or expensive to use reasonable care to avoid it while dramatically improving the tech. To pretend that any new tech would automatically lead to hundreds of deaths and should therefore never be considered is ridiculous on its face.

Airlines have dress codes for pilots.

“Reasonable care” is expensive for airline grade hardware. You don’t just add features because they sound good. You don’t throw tech at the wall and see what sticks. You engineer reasonable solutions to real problems.

It’s nothing like building a webpage.

I am fairly certain NTSB flight incident investigators understand fully well the safety implication of integrating an AliExpress recorder in the avionics suite of an aircraft. And wouod hence oppose such an idea quite strongly.

Cost of retrofitting? This particular Alaska MAX 9 is a plane that was just built and delivered late 2023. The 737 MAX family only went into service in 2017.

Im starting to wonder if the yet to be certified 777X will store for more than 2 hours as it takes 16 hour flights.

25 hours if sold (operated?) to EASA regulated carriers.

If privacy is the concern then it seems it would need to be bound to a certain protocol where in the event of an anomaly the transcript continues on for some extremely long time effectively unbounded by typical flight scenarios. The current situation acts as a backdoor to deletion.

It makes sense that retrofitting is expensive - that's labor and plane downtime for 5-7k commercial jets.

This airplane was brand new. It should be using something more modern.

Counterpoint: what price would it have to cost to make it not worth doing? I contend the actual cost will almost invariably be less than that.

If pilots have a privacy problem with it, then put the onus on pilots to not forget to turn off the recording. If they forget, they should be held accountable, ie lose their piloting license. Otherwise, they can't have it both ways, saying "we need our privacy" and also "it's not our fault we forgot to save the recording!"

Easy to armchair quarterback. But it's quite reasonable for the overall workforce to have some objections against 24x7 recording of everything they say. I'm surprised the Hacker News crowd, often quite pro-privacy and anti tracking, does not understand that.

And then suggesting to revoke the licenses of a crew that at one of the most stressful moments in their career, right after a major incident, forgets to pull a circuit breaker is ridiculous. Luckily that is not how things in the aviation industry are done.

On other hand I don't find 25 hours being recorded unreasonable with some of the very long flights we now have like 17-19 hours. Something early in flight could be critical clue in incident analysis.

Indeed, the FAA has just proposed to start doing that for new aircraft. Same as Europe where this has been put in place for aircraft manufactured from 2021 onwards.

The problem in the US is that there has also been more disciplinary use of the recordings (by the company, not the NTSB). In Europe things are a bit more strictly regulated and there wasn't any resistance to the 25 hour change.

> the longer recordings would be an invasion of worker privacy

Workers responsible for multi-million dollar machines and sometimes hundreds of human lives. I doubt anyone but the pilots care one bit about their on-the-job privacy.

I do. Because pilots being worried about what they say in the cockpit can have a negative impact on their reaction times, behaviour and crew management. All.of ehich can negatively impact flight safety. I want my pilots to feel comfortable while flying.

The privacy concerns can be mitigated by some rule changes.

Mandate the 25hr recording duration.

Mandate that full playback can only be done for accident investigation purposes By NTSB, unless requested by the crew(s). Some limited duration carve-out to allow maintenance crews to listen to last 15 mins to verify operation.

Agree. And I assume that in this case unions would oppose the 25 hour recordings.

Too latebto edit: I mean Union wpupd NOT oppose 25 hour recordings, if privacy and labor concerns would be properly adressed.

Indeed. This is how it works in Europe, with a 25 hour recording requirement for aircraft manufactured after 2021.

The problem with your viewpoint is that all major air carriers are unionised. So the opinion of the unions on privacy is a lot more important than what "anyone but the pilots" thinks about it.

Is unionization really a problem though? I’m ok with the status quo where flight crews have a say in aviation safety but random Internet commenters don’t.

No not at all. I meant unions are a good thing here, giving flight crews a say in things affecting their workplace instead of random internet commenters deciding they would like to record everything.

> privacy

That’s silly. And we all know it. Nothing in a cockpit is “private” in this regard when it comes to transport of hundreds of people.

> cost

There it is. That’s all it ever is. If the cost of doing it right is higher than the fines of gambling with doing it wrong, the wrong way will always be chosen.

This is bog standard corporate life under capitalism.

This is incorrect. It's not cost, if cost were the concern we would not have recorders at all. Cearly the cost of a longer recording is inconsequential once you have agreed to install a recorder at all.

It is about privacy, it's easy to verify the history of pilot's unions concerns and objections.

> at all

Incorrect. This is a struggle of ratio between regulation and lobby..

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