U.S. Lawmakers Push Plan to Upgrade 'Black Boxes'

Air Safety Week, July 28, 2003

Security benefit could propel passage of safety legislation

Legislation introduced in Congress last week represents a convergence of concern over safety and security. The bill proposes to require upgrading flight data and cockpit voice recorders, to have the government pay for the equipment, and to add deployable recorders, which would eject a protected housing containing critical data moments before impact.

Such recorders have been used successfully on military aircraft for years, expediting data recovery and providing accident investigators with critical information. The legislation offers a business opportunity to the half-dozen manufacturers of flight recorder systems.

Dubbed the "Safe Aviation and Flight Enhancement Act," or the SAFE Act for short, passage of the bill this year is problematic, but the legislation (H.R. 2632) sets the stage for possible passage in the future. For the present, the bill reflects a growing congressional concern about the need for improved flight recorders in order to reconstruct the causes of accidents and to provide a more detailed picture of terrorist attacks on airliners.

The bill also reflects impatience with the negligible rate of progress in the executive branch, where recommendations for upgraded cockpit voice and flight data recorders (CVR/FDR) have gone unimplemented for years.

Bipartisan support for the SAFE Act, from legislators dealing with aviation safety and security issues, respectively, once again shows a congressional willingness to intervene in the face of perceived gridlock in the executive branch. For example, Congress required traffic alert collision avoidance systems (TCAS) for cargo airliners when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated TCAS only for passenger airliners, and Congress overrode administration objections to arming pilots with handguns. Now known as the federal flight deck officer (FFDO) program, the notion of armed pilots seemed only a remote possibility, yet Congress showed a surprising level of support. A similar wellspring of unanticipated support could push passage of the SAFE Act sooner rather than later, because it links the needs of aviation safety to the "wartime" demands of homeland security.

Over the years, the crashworthy standards for flight recorders have been improved to the point where the so-called "black boxes" must be designed to withstand the impact equivalent to an automobile going 60 mph coming to a dead stop in half an inch (see ASW, June 9). But even if the black boxes "survive" the crash, they can be at the bottom of the ocean, where it can take days or weeks to locate and retrieve them. That delay can mean a time of great uncertainty in determining whether an air disaster was the result of a safety shortfall or a terrorist attack. For this reason, the SAFE Act calls for the installation of deployable recorders. Located flush on the tailfin, the springloaded data package with its satellite-linked locator beacon would pop off the aircraft, falling safely beyond the crash site. At sea, the deployable recorder would float on the water.

The 'what if' question

Instead of uncertainty prevailing for days or weeks while traditional recorders are located and recovered, the deployable recorder is seen as an important tool in the war against terrorism.

"I come to the SAFE initiative through my work on the appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security, where we frequently face the 'what if' questions as we try to prepare for and prevent a terrorist attack," said Rep. David Price (D-N.C.).

If a deployable recorder had been installed on United Airlines [OTC: UALAQ] Flight 93, which crashed Sept. 11, 2001, into a Pennsylvania field as passengers tried to regain control of the airplane seized by hijackers, Price said, "We might know exactly how the terrorists gained access to the cockpit. We might know better what transpired in the cockpit before the plane went down."

The tragedy of Flight 93 put the term "Let's roll" into the national lexicon, but the limited insights into what happened were gleaned almost entirely from cell phone conversations, not from the muffled sounds of struggle captured on the cockpit voice recorder (CVR).

Price also pointed to the abortive Dec. 22, 2001, attempt by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid to blow up American Airlines [NYSE: AMR] Flight 63 (see ASW, July 22, 2002). "If, God forbid, he had been successful, that plane would have gone down in the Atlantic Ocean, and the data and voice recorders would have likely been lost forever, thousands of feet under the sea. We might never have known what went wrong," Price said.

If Reid had been successful, the airplane's loss might well have been attributed to another center wing tank (CWT) explosion, which downed TWA Flight 800 in 1996.

In this respect, the inclusion of deployable recorders in the SAFE Act addresses the security issue.

Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.), another architect of the bill, also stressed the security aspect. "Unfortunately, on 9/11, we never recovered the black boxes from the World Trade Center attacks, and the cockpit voice recorder from the Pentagon crash was destroyed beyond use. We also lost critical information from the last moments of TWA Flight 800, and it took 13 days to recover the black boxes from EgyptAir 990," he said.