A former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) applauded the introduction of the Safe Aviation and Flight Enhancement (SAFE) Act of 2007 on 6 December by Congressman David Price (D – N.C.), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security of the House Appropriations Committee.

“Federal investigators rely on the information contained in these black boxes in order to piece together the events that lead to a flight disaster,” Price said. “In our post-9/11 world, it is important to have this information as soon as possible so that we can determine whether an incident is a threat to our national security.”

The bill is also supported by Rep. John Duncan (R – Tenn.), former Chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee. “Our current black box standards have proven inadequate given the threats of terrorism to our transportation systems,” Duncan said.

Jim Hall, Chairman of the NTSB from 1994-2001, said the legislation will benefit aviation safety and security. On the safety side, he cited USAir flight 427, which crashed in September 1994 while on approach to Pittsburgh. “Because the data recorder on the Boeing 737 captured only a small number of parameters, it took over four years for the NTSB to release its report,” Hall said. If a state-of-the-art deployable recorder had been installed, the time needed to figure out the cause of the crash would have been much reduced.

Deployable recorders also have a role to play in aviation security. As the 9/11 Commission stated, “(M)aximizing the amount of evidence to recreate the events of a terrorist attack is critical to understanding precisely what happened.” The Commission’s report recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) take steps to improve the survivability of flight data and cockpit voice recorders. “The introduction of this bill is in many ways an implementation of the 9/11 Commission,” said Hall. “I’m sure we all remember the days of panic when no one really knew what happened, what was next, or how to stop future terrorist attacks. Deployable recorders will remove a lot of the guesswork of investigations and help us effectively get all that information so that we can quickly take steps to ensure the security of the aviation industry.”

The SAFE Act would require commercial aircraft to be equipped with an additional “Black Box” that combines multiple data recorders into a single unit with deployable technology (see Figure A).

“I believe this bill will drastically improve the safety of our nation’s skies and the air traveling public,” Hall declared. “I have consistently advocated the introduction of improved flight data recorders since the NTSB first made recommendations for recorder improvement in 1999 during my time as chairman.”

Hall was joined in supporting the new legislation by the National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation whose president, Gail Dunham, praised Congress for introducing the SAFE Act. She said it will better ensure that the “Black Box” survives and that safety and security officials will have a “rapid response to the cause of the disaster.”

“Given the many past recorder problems, it is clear that U.S. must be better equipped to respond to an aviation disaster in the future, and prompt recovery of the recorder information is necessary for a prompt response,” Dunham said.

A deployable flight data recorder (DFR) contains a digital flight data recorder (DFDR), a cockpit voice recorder (CVR), and an emergency locator transmitter (ELT). When ejected by the aircraft, the unit flies into the air stream, landing outside the crash impact site, surviving the terminal velocity of the fall. Avoiding the direct impact, fire intensity, and entanglement of wreckage, the DFR can float on water indefinitely and emits a distress signal in both water and land crashes. This signal is detected by satellite within minutes of deployment and provides identification of the downed aircraft with 3-mile accuracy. “Deployable flight recorders take the search out of search and rescue,” said Hall. “This is precisely why they are being installed on the presidential Marine One helicopter.”

The ability of the recorder to float and to be found quickly eliminates the need for underwater recovery operations that can cost millions of dollars.

The addition of a deployable recorder to complement fixed recorders on aircraft – establishing redundancy – vastly improves the speed of data location and recovery over existing systems. “The past decade has seen numerous air disasters in which weeks or even months elapsed before recorders were recovered, often in severely damaged condition. DFRs can reduce that time to mere hours,” Hall said.

After the January 2007 crash of Adam Air flight 574 in Indonesia, recorders were not recovered for nearly eight months. The black boxes from the 9/11 World Trade Center airplanes were never found, and the CVR from the 9/11 Pentagon attack was damaged beyond use.

The importance of deployable recorders has an added significance when viewed in light of the rapidly changing nature of air travel, Hall maintained. As he explained, “We are facing what I like to call the ‘next generation of risks.’ Air traffic controllers are drastically understaffed, there is a looming pilot shortage, new aircraft are being introduced, and airport congestion is up. Overshadowing all these developments is a huge projected increase in demand for air travel. In fiscal year 2006, over 740 million passengers flew in American skies. That number is projected to reach a staggering 1 billion by 2015 and close to 2.3 billion by 2027.”

This increased demand not only means crowded skies and inconvenient delays, it also means an overall increase in potential safety risks. As a February 2007 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study concluded, if the current accident rate continues while air traffic potentially triples in the next 20 years, the United States would see an average of nine fatal commercial accidents each year. “In my opinion, nine fatal accidents and hundreds of lives lost per year is simply unacceptable,” Hall declared. “The introduction of this bill is a first step toward addressing this new set of safety challenges.

As presently crafted, the bill has limited applicability. It requires DFRs only on aircraft conducting extended-range operations (ETOPS) – meaning those flights authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly up to four hours from the nearest adequate emergency airport. “Recent rulings that have increased the allowable distance for ETOPS flights and that have authorized travel over inaccessible polar regions and remote, long distance ocean flights make deployables all the more important,” Hall declared. “Nevertheless, I believe the fundamental reasoning behind these recorders is applicable to all commercial aircraft.”

Hall said that had he been aware of deployable recorders when he was Chairman of the NTSB, he definitely would have recommended them for installation on airliners. He cited as an example the fatal crash 31 October 1999 of EgyptAir flight 990. The airplane plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from New York to Cairo, and there was enormous diplomatic controversy over the cause of the crash. The NTSB, as principal investigating authority, recovered the recorders from the ocean depths and concluded that the relief pilot directed the airplane into a suicide dive. If the flight recorders had been recovered early in the investigation, much of the diplomatic wrangling and controversy could have been avoided, Hall said. A deployable recorder would have been plucked off the surface of the water, obviating the need for the costly and time consuming effort that was taken to recover the recorders from the bottom of the ocean.

So long as Congress seems inclined to require recorder improvements, it may wish to consider what the NTSB has called for in its “Most Wanted” safety recommendations (see Figure B). The NTSB is frustrated that only new aircraft will feature an independent power supply for recorders, that there is no tangible activity to retrofit B737 aircraft with additional parameters regarding rudder movement, and that the FAA has not evidenced rulemaking activity regarding image recorders.

The NTSB would no doubt agree with Rep. Duncan that current recorder standards have proven “inadequate.” The board is clearly concerned about the reliability of power supply to the recorders, about relevant flight data that is not being captured, and the installation of video recorders on airplanes that aren’t required to be equipped with recorders so that cues and clues now lost are captured. The FAA has not been forthcoming on these needed improvements, and a legislative requirement, as is being entertained for deployable recorders, may be necessary.

Figure A

The deployable recorder, found on many military aircraft, would eject from an airliner automatically moments before impact, saving much information to aid investigators should the black boxes carried on the airplane be destroyed or lost.

Figure B

The NTSB’s recorder recommendations stem from various accidents. The 2-hour capacity and the 10-minute backup power supply stem from the 1998 Swissair flight 111 disaster. Additional recording parameters, such as pedal movement and force, resulted from the USAir flight 427 and other B737 crashes from uncommanded rudder reversals. The call for video recorders was made in the wake of a 2002 air charter crash of a King Air 100 that killed Sen. Paul Wellstone; the accident aircraft was not required to have flight data or cockpit voice recorders, but a video record of instruments and control motions in the cockpit was seen as a cost-effective solution.