NTSB seeks installation of ‘black boxes’ in copters

Federal safety investigators bypassed aviation regulators Tuesday and urged leading helicopter manufacturers to install socalled black boxes that would help determine the cause of crashes such as the one that killed former NBA star Kobe Bryant.

The National Transportation Safety Board appealed to six manufacturers after the Federal Aviation Administration failed to act on the board’s recommendations to require the devices on most helicopters. The safety board said turbine-powered helicopters should record data, audio and images during flight.

The NTSB identified seven crash investigations between 2011 and 2017 in which it said the lack of recorder information slowed its ability to find potential safety issues.

“The more information we have, the better we can understand not only the circumstances of a crash, but what can be done to prevent future accidents,” said Dana Schulze, director of aviation safety for the NTSB.

The NTSB’s move is unusual. The board investigates accidents but has no authority to make regulations; that falls to the FAA. The board said it recommended flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders in 2013 and 2015, but the FAA did not act. The request for image-recording capability is new.

The FAA did not immediately comment on the NTSB’s announcement.

In 2016, then-FAA Administrator Michael Huerta agreed that crash-resistant recorder systems provide additional information about the actions of helicopters and crews but said the agency would not require them because it couldn’t calculate a costbenefit ratio.

“In today’s rule-making environment, we have no way of estimating the number of lives that could be saved or the number of future accidents that could be prevented with the use of this additional data,” Huerta told the NTSB. He said the FAA decided instead to encourage manufacturers to add more recorders to their aircraft, and some do.

The NTSB made its request Tuesday to Sikorsky, Airbus Helicopters, Bell, Leonardo, MD Helicopters and Robinson.

Sikorsky manufactured the helicopter that crashed in January near Calabasas, California, killing Bryant, his daughter and seven others. It did not have black boxes.