Never another MH370: Column

Does it make sense that despite access to the most sophisticated search equipment, from military vessels and aircraft to deep sea drones, satellite imagery and ocean scanning, investigators searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have little more data to understand the cause of the disappearance than they had when searching for Amelia Earhart almost 80 years ago? As the most expensive search in aviation history, it is shameful that after two years we are left resting our hopes on more debris washing ashore. This simply didn’t need to happen. Now is the time to require an inexpensive device that has been available for years — deployable flight recorders.

Black boxes from accidents over land are often located quickly, but incidents over water continue to confound search teams, causing unnecessary delays with extreme costs: hundreds of millions of dollars spent searching, safety and security risks that linger in the absence of facts, and the tragic toll on families deserving answers.

If a plane crashes over water today, its black boxes sink with the wreckage. Underwater location pingers can be damaged or separated from their black boxes during crashes, leading to searches across thousands of miles of vast ocean depths.

The seven days that fueled conspiracy theories of TWA 800, the nearly two years it took to recover Air France 447’s black boxes despite knowing the location of the crash within days, and the now two-year disappearance of MH370 all raise the question: Why are we settling for black boxes that go down with the plane?

To address the issue, recent action by the International Civil Aviation Organization will require passenger aircraft worldwide to be equipped with black boxes that allow cockpit voice and flight data to be recovered without an underwater search.

The problem? Although technology is available today, the deadline for implementation isn’t until 2021. Furthermore, the new rules allow for "performance-based" solutions, meaning it’s up to aircraft manufacturers and airlines to decide how to meet the new no-underwater search requirement. While the approach is understandable, all proposed solutions are not equally effective.

In today’s hyperconnected world, some say we should stream black box information through the Internet in real time. But this approach raises significant logistical and security drawbacks. With more than 100,000 flights every day, transmitting black box information would overwhelm our satellite infrastructure and require colossal storage capacity. Limiting streaming to only select data, or only triggering streaming when abnormalities are detected, raises two immediate concerns. First, accidents rarely have warnings; and second, aviation laws require black boxes to record all flight data parameters and two hours of cockpit voice for a reason. To imply that some of the data is unnecessary, or that we can wait for it to be retrieved from the ocean floor, is shortsighted and leaves us in the position we’re in now.

Even if infrastructure is updated to allow the transmission and storage of all data, we must decide how the data will be collected. Would it be stored by national agencies, air carriers, aircraft manufacturers? Can companies be gatekeepers of safety and security data that could shed light on their own deficiencies? What are the privacy implications? Who owns the data? Every stakeholder will answer these questions differently. It could take years to resolve these issues, while planes would continue flying with deficient technology.

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Even if new rules are agreed upon, how do we deal with those who don’t play by the rules? As Internet security evolves, so too do the capabilities of hackers. We cannot be sure any information sent through the Internet is completely secure and tamper-resistant. And what of pilots’ privacy? It’s only a matter of time before streamed recordings fall into the wrong hands.

The best way to fix today’s shortcomings without the drawbacks of a vulnerable cyber environment is a deployable recorder that separates from the plane at crash impact, floats on water, and broadcasts both its location and the location of the aircraft at impact. Investigators would be able to recover the secure black box and the invaluable flight data it holds in a matter of hours — the era of yearlong searches would be over.

The International Civil Aviation authority deserves praise for making advanced flight recorders a worldwide priority and for leading efforts to address the challenging questions changing technology raises. In the meantime, global leaders in aviation safety such as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration must do more to make sure that companies voluntarily installing common-sense technologies such as deployable recorders have a clear and expedited path forward.

Let us not stand in the way of those who are tired of the status quo and who wish to ensure that  no one else experiences what the families of MH370 have endured. It is time for the world’s aviation community to act to require deployable recorders.

Jim Hall, managing partner of Hall & Associates, was chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001. 

In addition to its own editorials, Paste BN publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our  Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.