Cockpit Voice Recorder On Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Was Erased

08.01.2024 - 14:54 / forbes.com / Jennifer Homendy / Airlines

The cockpit voice recorder for Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 was overwritten, hampering investigators aiming to determine why a door plug for an exit door on the Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner blew out shortly after the flight took off from Portland on Friday night.

“There is nothing on the cockpit voice recorder,” Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), told reporters at a Sunday news conference following the first full day of investigation, adding that “since 2018, we’ve had we’ve done 10 investigations where the CVR was overwritten.”

When investigating any incident, the NTSB wants to listen to the audio from the cockpit to try to glean clues from verbal communication or sounds, such as mechanical noises or alarms that might be overheard. But too often that audio is not preserved for investigators, making it much harder to get to the bottom of what happened.

Homendy described the overwritten recording on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 as “a loss for FAA and a loss for safety, because that information is key, not just for our investigation, but for improving aviation safety.”

As the independent U.S. government investigative agency responsible for civil transportation accident investigations, the NTSB has called for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to increase black-box recording time to 25 hours, which is the norm in Europe and in many other countries.

Currently, the FAA requires black-box recordings to be kept for only two hours. Historically, the agency has pushed back on retaining black-box recordings for longer time periods, often citing costs as a reason not to make the change.

The NTSB has strongly recommended a 25-hour CVR since 2018, following an incident at San Francisco International Airport where an Air Canada plane came within 60 feet of four aircraft waiting to take off. “On that taxiway were four airplanes with a combined total of about 1,000 people,” Homendy said, adding that the 2018 investigation was made more difficult because the plane’s CVR had been erased.

Five years later, the NTSB chair again pushed for a 25-hour recording time at an FAA safety summit in March 2023, following a string of near-collisions on runways had one thing in common: In every instance, the CVR had been overwritten.

On Sunday, Homendy said that since the Alaska Airlines flight crew did not pull the circuit breaker for the CVR, the recording was overwritten at the two-hour mark, leaving investigators on the scene unable to use the data.

Progress on this issue has been both too slow and too weak, according to Homendy. “The FAA, thankfully, has taken some recent action to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking to extend CVR time from two hours to 25 hours, but only on newly