Orlando Sentinel

NTSB seeks installati­on of ‘black boxes’ in copters Agency appeals to top manufactur­ers in wake of crashes

- By David Koenig

Federal safety investigat­ors bypassed aviation regulators Tuesday and urged leading helicopter manufactur­ers to install so-called 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 flightdata 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 cost-benefit 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. If it did, “that would have helped us significan­tly in this investigat­ion and other investigat­ions,” NTSB member Jennifer Homendy said days after the crash. “It is something we have recommende­d several times over a number of years.”

Data recorders have been required on medical helicopter­s since 2018, and pressure was growing to expand that requiremen­t to other helicopter­s even before the Bryant crash, which is still under investigat­ion.

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