Push to add second box to planes
Experts say device would have made short work of hunt
A Canadian-developed “deployable recorder” would have located the missing Malaysian plane within minutes, says an aviation expert who has been pushing to have it on all aircraft as a second recorder.
An aircraft recorder and transmitter beacon that’s often listed as one of the 50 greatest Canadian inventions — with a Montreal connection — would have located the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 within minutes of its crash, experts agree.
The crash position indicator (CPI) or so-called “deployable recorder” was invented in the 1960s by Ottawa’s Leigh Instruments, Jim Hall, the former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, said in an interview.
Leigh merged in 1992 with SPAR Aerospace — the company whose Montreal space subsidiary in Ste-Anne-deBellevue developed the space shuttle’s Canadarm. SPAR’s later incarnation was subsequently acquired by current owner MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates Ltd.
New Jersey-based DRS Technologies Inc., part of Italian aerospace group Finmeccanica, later acquired some elements of SPAR technology. DRS announced on Monday that its Canadian subsidiary near Ottawa “will be providing communications systems in support of the Royal Australian Navy’s ANZAC-class frigates” in the search for the downed Malaysian airplane.
The NTSB said in an interview Tuesday that the deployable recorder should be standard equipment on all commercial aircraft, particularly those that fly over water.
Hall, now president of Washington-based consultancy Hall & Associates LLC, cited “the inaction” of two Montreal-based aviation institutions for the failure to locate the crash site of MH370 — the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, and the International Air Transport Association, or IATA.
The former, a United Nations organization, is responsible for setting the world’s aviation standards, norms and procedures, and the latter is the world’s airline lobby.
Hall, the NTSB’s chairman from 1994 to 2001, said that after poring over many acci- dent reports, he became convinced deployable recorders were needed.
As an aviation safety expert and consultant, “I made several trips to Montreal after Air France 447 (which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009) specifically to ask ICAO and encourage them to take these actions on deployable recorders.”
“I made several recommendations to ICAO’s Air Navigation Commission, and one of the important ones is still sitting there — five years later,” said Hall. “It was that there should be two sets of recorders on all aircraft. One in the front, one in the rear. The other (recommendation) was cameras in the cockpit.”
The device is a modified black box that would be installed in addition to the traditional flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. The emergency location transmitter (ELT) would sit in the tail section of the aircraft — at the other end of the conventional black boxes that are located in the front of the aircraft.
“The deployable recorder is equipped with a trigger, so on impact, it’s ejected away from the aircraft (debris field). It’s also designed to float indefinitely, and it starts putting out signals to dedicated emergency satellites that are in low orbit around the Earth.
“So in the case of the Malaysian aircraft, you would immediately have known its location,” Hall said.
The deployable recorders are on many jet fighters “like our $40-million F-18s. So in terms of high-speed accidents, it has a long, proven record that it works.”
A deployable recorder is also installed on Air Force One, which is usually the modified Boeing 747 used by U.S. presidents.
Said Hall: “I oversaw investigations of TWA Flight 800 (a 1996 crash, killing 230 people on board), EgyptAir 990 (crashed by a suicidal pilot in 1999, killing 217 people), BirgenAir Flight 301, (a Turkish operator whose plane crashed off the Dominican Republic in 1996, killing 189 passengers and crew), Alaska Air Flight 261 (in 2000 that killed 88 people), and we worked with Canadians on the Swissair Flight 111 incident (in 1998 that killed 229 aboard off the coast of Nova Scotia) and with the Indonesian government on the SilkAir accident (a pilot suicide that killed 104 people in 1997).
“They convinced me of the necessity for these deployable recorders.
“After Air France 447, the French BEA (Bureau d’enquêtes et d’analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile) did an analysis that shows deployables to be the most favourable long-term solution.”
ICAO spokesperson Anthony Philbin said i n an email that after the Air France disaster, various working groups studied 42 crashes of wide-body aircraft over water, and that installing deployable recorders was one of three recommendations retained by the groups.
The recommendation about the deployable recorders has not yet been acted on.
Hall said, “I certainly blame IATA as well. IATA has a responsibility to the travelling public that exceeds the economic interests of Boeing, Airbus, or the airlines (which object to the costs of installing and maintaining these systems), or any of these people who are making a profit off those passengers.
“I know, ICAO always says it takes time. Well, I’m 72 and I don’t have a hell of a lot of time. I understand the complexity of divergent national interests. But if they can’t act in the interests of the people who fly internationally, why would they exist?”
Philbin noted that “ICAO appreciates the frustration sometimes expressed with the processes needed to develop global consensus on new air transport recommendations. Gaining comprehensive agreement among our 191 member states is very complex work and, even once this has been achieved, there remain separate legal, operational and commercial considerations (among others) which can significantly impact system-wide implementation timelines.”
IATA spokesperson Mona Aubin said experts were not immediately available for comment.
The technology for deployable recorders on aircraft was developed in Canada in the 1960s.
“It was done at the behest of the Canadian government,” said Hall.
“The situation at the time was that there was a real problem in the northern part of Canada.” After a crash in the tundra, search-and-rescue aircraft most often could not locate the site.
“The snow would fall and immediately cover up the aircraft, making it difficult for accident investigations. So (Ottawa) asked that something be done, and the deployable recorder was developed (by Ottawa’s Leigh Instruments).”