That two different recorders both went titsup at the same time I find mind boggling and very sus.
edit: apparently they have both AC and a battery backup, if the internet is to be believed.
Which makes a simultaneous loss of two devices with battery backups... curious.
Did they get hit with an EMP?
Meanwhile every time I read about a crash, I'm horrified by how primitive the requirements (and implementation) appear to be.
This reminds me of my favourite method for reviewing software I had never heard of: I check the release notes. If version v17 has "now uses transactions" then that means that the developers were happy to release the first sixteen major versions with data corruption as a feature. (Conversely, if the notes only mention fantastically obscure scenarios being fixed, then the basic issues have been fixed long ago.)
Battery backup being introduced in 2010 as a requirement is absolutely insane. It's not like batteries or battery backup are new technologies! This stuff has been around forever. Why on earth was this not a requirement decades ago!?
The most unqualified person can be driving a 10,000 pound (4,500kg) electric Hummer and have no measures in place to use the built in cameras and sensors to determine what went wrong in the event of a collision.
Hell, there are cameras inside the vehicle that can tell us whether or not a driver was using their phone when a crash happens, but it does not seem politically popular to enforce reviewing this footage, even though being in a personal car is far more dangerous than being a passenger on a plane.
When airbags came out, video recording was expensive, but that has long not been the case.
Video isn't required because even these black boxes, AFAIK, are STILL not required in the US. They also introduce unacceptable privacy compromises for Americans, seeing as how most people subconsciously treat their car as an extension of their living room.
…that is my point. For the most dangerous activity people in the country do, we avoid laws that would help ascribe blame because everyone wants to be able to break the rules. A pilot gets recorded, regardless of their privacy, because they are responsible for other people’s lives.
Why not drivers? They certainly cause damage to other people. And at a rate far higher than a person doing ANY other activity. It’s not about privacy, it is about wanting to avoid accountability.
Dashcams, by contrast, provide the operator with reasonable evidence of other drivers' behavior, and consequently are popular - people pay out of pocket to install them.
I suspect that if laws were passed requiring use of telemetry and dashcams all over, all that would really happen is that rates would rise to reflect new data on how badly most of us drive, and claim denials would skyrocket.
So your incentive is to pay less money, and their incentive is to pay less money. They figured out a way to do that and still be in business. Obviously, some people might value driving over the speed limit more than the lower premium.
> I suspect that if laws were passed requiring use of telemetry and dashcams all over, all that would really happen is that rates would rise to reflect new data on how badly most of us drive, and claim denials would skyrocket.
You don’t think people would change their behavior if their actions were likelier to result in consequences to their bank account and/or prison time?
Almost everyone is distracted driving to the point that personal motor vehicles are, by far, the leading morbidity and mortality risk for people, especially children.
We go scorched earth when kids are kidnapped or otherwise at risk, but for personal cars, we explicitly look the other way when we have a way to make kids safer.
Quite the double standard people have when they want to break the rules themselves.
The battery issue isn’t idle speculation; a recent flight I was scheduled for was cancelled when the airline accidentally allowed a battery to deep discharge, necessitating a new battery to be flown in from another city (delaying the flight so badly it was cancelled instead and passengers delayed to the next day).
I welcome the formation of your company selling already-certified batteries that will not damage anything around them (like the precious recorded data) if they go from 500 to 0 in no seconds flat, are subjected to pressures of a few kilometers of water, or to a post-crash fire.
It's my recollection of several crashes, where the plane is not immediately recoverable that there is always a concern that the black boxes will overwrite themselves.
The time period they record tends to be very short, but that does raise an interesting question, when do they stop recording?