1
Introduction

Aviation safety in air travel has always been a vital part of the aviation industry. Endless man-hours have gone into improving the safety standards of aircraft for civilian, commercial, and military aviation. Since the inception of commercial aviation, industry safety standards have improved dramatically, making flying one of the safest modes of transportation today. Even with a great record of safety today, measures are still undertaken to ensure that aviation accidents are not only well understood but also that they may, in the future, be made avoidable. Studying and understanding the causes of aircraft incidents and crashes is one of the main methods used to ensure that transportation in the sky is as safe as possible. One of the main methods used by investigators and engineers to study the causes of aircraft accidents is the use of the flight data and cockpit voice recorder (FDR/CVR), also known as the Black Box. However, FDR/CVR has not been efficiently useful in some catastrophic accidents such as the recent Aeroflot Flight 1492 (a Sukhoi Superjet 100) that was operating a domestic flight in Russia [Hradecky, 2019], the Lion Air Flight 610 (a Boeing 737 MAX 8) that crashed into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta [National Transportation Safety, 2018], the EgyptAir Flight 804 (an Airbus A320) that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea [Yeung, 2016], and the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 (a Boeing 777-200ER) that disappeared on 8 March 2014 [MacLeod et al., 2014], just to name a few. Throughout this book, we will explore a real-time ground-based FDR/CVR as an alternative to the existing FDR/CVR.

1.1 Motivation

The FDR/CVR is an electronic device that is installed on board an aircraft and is used to record important details about the status and performance parameters of the aircraft. Accident investigators use the data stored in the FDR and CVR to try and piece together the events preceding the accident to pinpoint what went wrong with the flight. The information contained in the FDR and CVR plays an extremely important role in the investigation of airplane malfunctions and crashes. However, there have been incidents in the past where investigators were unable to recover FDR and CVRs from crash sites. This leaves them without one of their most valuable resources in discovering the causes of a catastrophe. Reports have shown that since 1980, there have been nearly 30 aviation accidents in which the flight recorder was either not found or damaged, and hence data was not recovered. On the other hand, in some commercial aviation accidents over water, the recovery time delay of the FDR/CVR could range from a week to a couple of years. This adds heavy costs to the search process and brings danger to rescuers lives in some situations, like what happened during the Lion Air Flight 610 (MAX 8), when one member of the volunteer rescue team died during the CVR recovery operations. In the following, we lay out detailed examples of catastrophic flight accidents that involved such kinds of drawbacks in the recovery work.

On 5 May 2019, Aeroflot Flight 1492 [Hradecky, 2019], a Sukhoi Superjet 100 operating a domestic flight in Russia, suffered an inflight electrical failure shortly after departing from Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, and returned to the airport where it caught fire after landing; 41 of the 78 people on board died. The CVR was found in satisfactory condition, but the FDR casing was damaged by exposure to extremely high temperature. On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 [National Transportation Safety, 2018], a Boeing 737 MAX 8, crashed into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta en route to Depati Amir Airport in Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia. All 181 passengers and eight crew members were killed. After two days, on 1 November 2018, of searching operations, the flight's FDR was recovered, which was located at a depth of 32?m (105?ft) underwater, while the CVR was reported as not found. During these two days of recovery operations, one member of the volunteer rescue team died. Lion Air paid US$2.8 million for a second attempt to search for the CVR between 19 and 29 December. The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) funded a further underwater search operation using the Indonesian Navy vessel KRI (kapal perang Republik Indonesia) Spica, which started on 8 January 2019 and continued until the CVR was recovered on 14 January. The CVR was found at a depth of 30?m (98?ft) covered by mud that was 8?m (26?ft) thick. The third example of these kinds of catastrophes is EgyptAir Flight 804 (Airbus A320) [Yeung, 2016], a regularly scheduled international passenger flight from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to Cairo International Airport operated by EgyptAir, which on 19 May 2016 crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, killing all 56 passengers, 3 security personnel, and 7 crew members on board. After a multinational search and recovery operation, the flight recorders were recovered after 10 days (29 June 2016) resting on the sea floor, 3000 meters down. Another example is the most notable deadliest incident involving Boing 777 and the deadliest in Malaysia airline history is the Malaysia Airlines Flight (MH370) [MacLeod et al., 2014] that disappeared on 8 March 2014, and all 239 passengers and crew were presumably missing. The CVR and FDR recorders have not been found until today (as we are writing this book). On 6 October 2014, the governments of Malaysia, China, and Australia made a joint commitment to search of the seafloor thoroughly, but after nearly three years of combing the far desolate Indian Ocean and its deep seabed of a zone without finding the missing Boeing 777. Then the governments of Malaysia, Australia, and China called off the most complex and expensive search in aviation history. In June 2014, Time (https://time.com/2854385/mh370-search-spending/) estimated that the total search effort up to that point had cost nearly US$70 million. Malaysia's Ministry of Transport revealed that it had spent 280.5 million Malaysian ringgit (US$70 million) on the research as of February 2016. Some search plans were proposed to the Malaysian government during the period 2017-2022. Here it is worthwhile to quote the statement: "Despite every effort using the best science available, cutting-edge technology, as well as modeling and advice from highly skilled professionals who are the best in their field, unfortunately, the search has not been able to locate the aircraft", the Joint Agency Coordination Center in Australia said in a statement [Denyer, 2017]. On the contrary, Ocean Infinity, with the Malaysian government's approval, declared in January 2018 that it would resume the search in a narrow area [Associated Press, 2018]; however, on 9 June 2018, it was revealed that the search had been unsuccessful [Gartland, 2019]. In March 2019, Ocean Infinity stated again that it was ready to resume the search. They believed that the most probable location was still somewhere along the seventh arc around the area identified previously and upon which its 2018 search was based. In March 2022, they committed to resuming their search in 2023 or 2024, pending approval by the Malaysian government.

As seen from the previous examples, it is obvious that traditional CVR/FDR recorders are not effectively reliable; they are either not found, damaged, or recovered late. Even in the cases when the FDR/CVR recorders are found, the recovery operations were reported to be costly and took a long time. Table 1.1 summarizes commercial aviation accidents over water between the years 2000 and 2015, for which the FDR or CVR recovery time was a week or more. As seen in the table, in some accidents, it took around two years to find the FDR/CVR recorders.

Flight-recorded data could be used further if it were made available to technicians and specialists on the ground while the plane is still in-flight to possibly prevent catastrophe. In addition to being outdated, storing flight data onboard the aircraft is ineffective and limited by the quantity of data stored. Today's wireless telecommunication technologies can be utilized to achieve the goal of transmitting real-time (up to the minute) flight information data from aircraft to stations on the ground, creating a ground-based mirror of FDR/CVR recorders. These ground-based stations can be used by technicians not only for data storage but also for data analysis and monitoring as well as technical support.

Table 1.1 Commercial aviation accidents over water from 2000 to 2015 where the recovery of the CVR or the FDR took a week or more.

Source: Adapted from NTSB [n.d.].