Schumer urges helicopter safety

Senator: Install ‘black boxes’

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s top Democrat has called on the Federal Aviation Administration to heed warnings from federal safety investigators and require that all helicopters be equipped with a flight-data recorder, commonly known as a “black box.”

Sen. Charles Schumer’s call for action on Sunday comes days after a helicopter crashed on the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper, killing the pilot. The helicopter was not equipped with a flight data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder, according to federal investigators.

The National Transportation Safety Board has pushed the FAA to implement its data recorder safety recommendation for years. In documents reviewed by The Associated Press, the safety agency said the FAA has maintained that it has been unable to justify the mandate because “the benefits of recorders are difficult to identify and quantify because the absence of a recorder will never cause an accident.”

Large commercial planes and some private aircraft are required, under FAA regulations, to have two so-called black boxes that record information — a flight data recorder that monitors altitude and other instrumentation, and a cockpit voice recorder, which records radio transmissions and sounds in the cockpit. But there is no such requirement for helicopters.

“To know that the [National Transportation Safety Board] has been trying for years, without success, to compel the FAA to take action as it relates to making helicopters more valuable to safety by installing flight data recorders is cause for serious concern,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement to the AP.

The FAA said in a statement that it was supporting the investigation into the New York crash and that it was “premature to consider any actions pending the outcome of the investigation.”

The National Transportation Safety Board has been recommending data recorders on helicopters for several years and pushed the FAA to enact new regulations after a medical helicopter crashed in Missouri in 2011, killing four people. Safety investigators said the pilot had been texting, and they recommended then that the FAA require all newly manufactured none-xperimental helicopters to have both flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders.

The FAA has not enacted any such requirement.

In a notice to the FAA last year, the safety agency said 159 aircraft involved in crashes from 2005 to 2017 had no form of recording equipment. The agency, which is charged with investigating transportation crashes across the U.S., said it was more difficult to investigate with the lack of information.

Of those 159 crashes, the National Transportation Safety Board was not able to determine the probable cause for 18 of them, the agency said. It argues federal investigators would have more information to conduct critical safety probes if the data recorders were installed.

Last week’s crash was the second in Manhattan in a month and led to renewed calls for restricting helicopter flights over the city.