Flight International - January 13, 2015

34 | Flight International | 13-19 January 2015 flightglobal.com

AIRLINE SAFETY

DAVID LEARMOUNT LONDON

Slow but steady progress is being made

towards the implementation of

deployable flight data recorders,

although reliability is still a concern

MISSING

LINK

The wreckage of AF447 was found

quickly, but it took two more years

to locate the A330’s black boxes

The Air France A330 crashed in June 2009

C

ommercial air transport aircraft will
soon be required to be equipped
with deployable flight data record-
ers, or flight tracking equipment, or
both. The only question is how soon.
ICAO has set up working groups to investi-
gate the available technologies and make rec-
ommendations, and influential organisations
like the Flight Safety Foundation have thrown
their weight behind the idea. Airbus now says
it is preparing to equip its large widebody
fleet with deployable flight data and cockpit
voice recorder (FDR/CVR) systems, while
Boeing has already installed deployable re-
corders on at least three military fleets, but so
far disagrees with its European competitor
that the technology is appropriate or safe for

use on commercial transport aircraft.

The June 2009 loss of Air France flight 447

in the South Atlantic led to renewed – and

strident – calls for deployable FDRs (DFDRs)

with embedded emergency locator transmit-

ters (ELT), because it took two years of costly

searching to locate the wreckage of the Airbus

A330-200 on the seabed and recover the FDR/

CVR. When recovered, the recorders did,

however, yield up their data.

The delay in recovering important AF447

data and the expense of the two-year search to

find the seabed wreckage led to the recently-

announced Airbus decision to install a de-

ployable FDR/CVR with a locator beacon on

future A350s and A380s. Speaking in Wash-

ington DC at the US National Transportation

Safety Board’s forum on emerging flight data

and locator technology, Airbus head of secu-

rity operations Pascal Andrei said that the air-

framer has been working with suppliers on

deployable recorders and technology will be

available “very quickly”, while admitting the

company has to complete some additional

studies. More recently, when Malaysia Air-

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