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Comment by Zetobal | Hacker News Reader

If they don't report it they don't have to pull the cockpit recorder lever and after 1 1/2 hours there is no trace of their fumble except their own reports...

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I understand the reasoning for the 'black box' to have limited storage. I do not understand the reasoning that supports lack of a trace log to retain in the face of turbulence and other possible lawsuit generating events such as this.

My understanding is, various aircraft/airlines have logging facilities with longer memories, just it's up to the airline to look through them.

Normally if you're looking at a black box, you know something suboptimal already occured.

Commercial have digital twins these days, RR’s entire business model relies on having always on real time telemetry from all of its engines because it doesn’t sell engines anymore it leases flight hours so they have a digital twin for each RR engine in service and they predict when parts and servicing needs to happen and make sure that an alternative engine(s), parts and service crew will be available just in time.

Why not pair the limited storage with something more long lasting? The long-lasting could be a heavy-duty ssd that holds 8tb or something. That is weeks worth of audio and data. If that's lost in a crash or incident, so be it, it was probably severe incident and the 1.5 hour backup is all that's needed anyway.

Exactly what I was suggesting. A non-disaster storage media that doesn't need the rigor of the expensive and limited solution already present for disaster diagnosis.

The Blackbox records over the whole flight. I am only talking about the cockpit voice recorder. It's the best indicator to see how something went down in the cockpit after an incident were the flight crew lost situational awareness.

Blackbox is only for accident cases

For the day to day there is a recording system called FOQA which can (and does) get analyzed, and stores more or less the same thing as the blackbox

Of course trying to be sneaky doesn't help when ATC noticed what happened

Uh the telemetry is pretty unusual. That gets broadcast. And the airline's HQ would see this in real-time.

Yeah, but if they don't report and no one from their company "sees" it they don't have to pull the circuit...

No trace, except for the cabin crew and the logs kept by ATC.

In situations like these you get the most information from the voice recorder. You can't abstract a lot about what really happened in the cockpit from telemetry and the cabin crew is not in the cockpit.

This is a minor incident. I don't think they would have been asked to return to the gate over this.

Yeah, but they would have to break the circuit if they report an incident.

> ...recovered about 800 feet above water

the way I read it, there were only 800 ft (less than 250 m, or around 15 seconds at a sink rate of 3000 fpm) standing between a "minor incident" and a major disaster.

"As any real racer would tell you, whether you win by an inch or a mile, winning is winning".

Almost crashing your airplane is always a major incident in commercial aviation.

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