As we learn more about what happened on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 before, during, and after a door plug on the Boeing 737-9 MAX blew out while en route from Portland to Ontario, California, on Friday night, there's a new development about what federal investigators won't know.
In the wake of each aviation incident, federal investigators collect as much information as they can in the hope of identifying and preventing similar issues to keep America's air transportation system as safe as possible. That almost always includes investigating the contents of the "black box," which is actually two distinct items: the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR).
In the case of Alaska 1282, the CVR contains "nothing" of use to investigators, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Its Chair, Jennifer Homendy, praised the actions of the crew as "really incredible" and "heroic" based on interviews since the incident before explaining why her team won't be able to review a recording of what transpired on the flight deck as chaos ensued.
Investigator-in-Charge John Lovell examines the fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX. pic.twitter.com/luikyh9OhG
— NTSB Newsroom (@NTSB_Newsroom) January 8, 2024
While the FDR provided helpful data "to narrow the area" as it searched for the blown-out door plug, Homendy said "the cockpit voice recorder was completely overwritten" and "there is nothing on the cockpit voice recorder."
Explaining that, because "the circuit breaker for the CVR was not pulled," it continued recording after the plane made a safe landing. When "the maintenance team went out to get [the CVR], it was right at about the two-hour mark and it was completely overwritten" because "at two hours it re-records over [itself] so we have nothing."
That two-hour recording length is the standard in the U.S. and all that is required for aircraft. As the investigation of Alaska 1282 highlights, that's not always long enough to allow investigators to access relevant recordings — and this isn't the first time a CVR has proven useless to the NTSB.
According to Homendy, there have been 10 investigations conducted by the NTSB since 2018 where the CVR was overwritten, four were dealing with runway incursions. "Back in 2018, there was a very significant near-miss with an Air Canada plane that almost landed on a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport," Homendy noted. "On that taxiway were four airplanes with a combined total of about 1,000 people. The Air Canada plane came within 60 feet of coming right down on one of those airplanes that had passengers on it before it began to perform a go-around," she continued. "The CVR was completely overwritten."
Due to the frequency of investigations in which cockpit voice recorders are overwritten and essentially useless, Homendy noted discussions to increase the overwrite time on CVRs from two hours to 25 hours — consistent with standards in Europe and other countries — but was critical that needed action has not yet been taken.
"The FAA, thankfully, has taken some recent action to issue a notice of proposed rule-making to extend CVR time from two hours to 25 hours, but only on newly manufactured aircraft," Homendy explained, meaning it would not apply to aircraft currently in service that have decades of service life ahead of them.
"You can easily install a different cockpit voice recorder and increase the time from two hours to 25 hours," Homendy argued of the relatively simple procedure that could be used to retrofit existing planes. Saying CVRs are "not just convenient" for investigators, she stated they are "critical to helping us accurately pinpoint what was going on" and "key to safety" for the airline industry,
For Alaska 1282 and the other incidents she mentioned in recent years, the lack of any useful information on a CVR is "a loss for [NTSB], a loss for FAA, and a loss for safety," Homendy emphasized.
"I'm calling on the FAA to change the rulemaking," the NTSB chair continued. "We are calling for 25-hour CVRs in not just new aircraft but retrofitting aircraft." If the FAA does not adjust its proposed rule, Homendy said she hopes "Congress will take action in the FAA reauthorization bill to ensure that it does."