New Black Boxes Will Be Easier to Track in Plane Crashes at Sea
- 7 years ago
New Black Boxes Will Be Easier to Track in Plane Crashes at Sea
In the event of a crash, the deployable recorder will be released from the plane, “triggered either by structural deformation in the fuselage or
because it starts to go under water,” Mr. Champion, of Airbus, said.
Aircraft will carry both a fixed and deployable version, each storing 25 hours of cockpit
voice — up from about two hours now — and data on thousands of flight parameters.
“The first alert will go off within three seconds after the beacon is deployed,”
said Blake van den Heuvel, director of air programs at DRS Technologies Canada.
“For the ones that don’t get recovered, I think you’ll find
that we have situations where we’ve had a midair collision of two tactical aircraft, two very, very small aircraft both approaching Mach 1, and in that event you have very little left of the aircraft,” he said.
When a plane crashes into water, a sonic beacon on the recorders sends out a signal for about 30 days.
After a multinational, multimillion-dollar search that lasted more than two years, the flight data
and cockpit voice recorders were finally recovered from the ocean floor.
But a new generation of recorders, announced this summer by Airbus
and set to roll out on new A350 airframes in late 2019, will make those boxes easier to retrieve.
In the event of a crash, the deployable recorder will be released from the plane, “triggered either by structural deformation in the fuselage or
because it starts to go under water,” Mr. Champion, of Airbus, said.
Aircraft will carry both a fixed and deployable version, each storing 25 hours of cockpit
voice — up from about two hours now — and data on thousands of flight parameters.
“The first alert will go off within three seconds after the beacon is deployed,”
said Blake van den Heuvel, director of air programs at DRS Technologies Canada.
“For the ones that don’t get recovered, I think you’ll find
that we have situations where we’ve had a midair collision of two tactical aircraft, two very, very small aircraft both approaching Mach 1, and in that event you have very little left of the aircraft,” he said.
When a plane crashes into water, a sonic beacon on the recorders sends out a signal for about 30 days.
After a multinational, multimillion-dollar search that lasted more than two years, the flight data
and cockpit voice recorders were finally recovered from the ocean floor.
But a new generation of recorders, announced this summer by Airbus
and set to roll out on new A350 airframes in late 2019, will make those boxes easier to retrieve.