Airbus rethinks black boxes and accident data recovery

Airbus is exploring new ways to recover flight data after crashes, with live geolocation data and ejectable recorders.

An EgyptAir Airbus A320 crashed last month, killing all 66 passengers and crew.

Airbus is exploring new ways to recover crucial flight data in the event of plane crashes by using live streaming geolocation data and deploying ejectable recorders in a bid to help investigations into aircraft disasters.

The moves to reassess how black box recorders can be recovered comes after fruitless efforts to find missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 since it disappeared in March 2014.

Investigators are also still scouring the Mediterranean Sea for the fuselage and black boxes of EgyptAir Flight 804 after it crashed earlier this month with 66 people on board.

Recovery of black box recorders is crucial in piecing together how and why planes crash. The devices typically consist of a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder which provide information including cockpit noises, the flight’s airspeed, altitude and direction.

But while cockpit voice and flight data recorders are equipped with underwater beacons to help locate them in the event of air crash disasters, batteries on the beacons last just 30 days.

“It is clearly frustrating when we have those flights over water and we lose an aircraft, and not being able to know what happened,” said Charles Champion, executive vice-president for engineering at Airbus.

Airbus, however, is investigating ways to make it easier to receive this crucial flight data and has begun looking at alternative solutions to the industry-standard black box.

One alternative would be to use an online data streaming system to monitor data during flights. Such a system would not continuously stream data to ground-based computers but would instead activate if there were indications of abnormal activity and then automatically send torrents of data to be analysed.

“This reinforces our overall approach to find solutions to get data out of accidents as soon as possible,” said Mr Champion.

But Mr Champion said that while Airbus was speaking with airlines about available options, the cost of the bandwidth required for transmissions continued to be a significant hurdle.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation, the UN agency that sets global aviation standards, has moved to improve flight tracking systems and in March this year approved a requirement that by November 2018 all airliners report their position over open ocean about every 15 minutes.

The new rules mean aircraft must also carry “autonomous distress tracking devices” that can transmit location information at least once every minute in distress circumstances, while cockpit voice recorders must be able to store at least 25 hours of recording.

Airbus is also looking at the possibility of installing black boxes that could be ejected from aircraft in the event of a crash, allowing investigators to find them more quickly.

But while such a system could be installed today, as it is on many military aircraft, regulators have concerns about the pyrotechnics.