Cockpit recorders for GA?

Maybe we can get them installed on our cars too!
 
SkyHog said:
Maybe we can get them installed on our cars too!
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I'm not sure you understand how modern cars work. We do have data recorders in them. Cars have more powerful electronic than our space shuttle did. It's not necessary to get the data because it's usually operator error. However it's used for other things like maintenance cycles, car specific issues etc.

I'm not sure what makes pilots literally paranoid of the 21st century.
 
I'm not sure why the next generation wants everyone to know what they are doing at every moment. I prefer my privacy. It's my life, not everyone else's.
 
EdFred said:
I'm not sure why the next generation wants everyone to know what they are doing at every moment. I prefer my privacy. It's my life, not everyone else's.
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I don't want them to know everything. I'm not saying upload the data to "the big bad government" I'm saying if my wing falls off I want the people investigating my death to know exactly what I was doing to cause that, whether that was in engineering parameters or not. Nix the CVR but the engine and control input data could be invaluable.

Literally paranoid.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
I don't want them to know everything. I'm not saying upload the data to "the big bad government" I'm saying if my wing falls off I want the people investigating my death to know exactly what I was doing to cause that, whether that was in engineering parameters or not. Nix the CVR but the engine and control input data could be invaluable.

Literally paranoid.
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You don't get a choice, that's what you aren't seeing. When that data is there for all to see, all will see it.
 
A recording device? It's call a GoPro, and I judiciously edit the audio after every use.
Hopefully, the incident that finally kills me will destroy the GoPro so there is no evidence to use against my estate.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
I'm not sure you understand how modern cars work. We do have data recorders in them. Cars have more powerful electronic than our space shuttle did. It's not necessary to get the data because it's usually operator error. However it's used for other things like maintenance cycles, car specific issues etc.

I'm not sure what makes pilots literally paranoid of the 21st century.
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I don't think it is literal paranoia. I think it is more of a "we live in a litigious society, and this will be used to sue my heirs" issue.

Plus - I don't like the government knowing too much about me. The fact that you'll be flying an airplane is reason enough for them to collect the data for future use.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
With massive advancements in memory storage (solid state) why aren't there cockpit voice recorders... Or more importantly systems recorders in GA aircraft? I can't imagine the weight penalty would be significant, and cost would be next to nothing when one thinks about the cost of a new plane.
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To what end? The causes of most SE GA accidents where one or two people die are pretty uninteresting in the grand scheme of things. Arguably, too many resources are spent investigating them already. How many AMUs would you pay to have an FDR in your plane just in case you're ever dead and someone really wants the possibility of maybe having a little bit more info on what happened?
 
mkosmo said:
Anything you did or said that could be used against you if you have an inspector crawling up your ass.
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So.... if you screw up doing something you're not supposed to and get fanged for it, you're gonna have evidence of you doing something you're not supposed to be doing... and that's the argument against?
 
With the FAA's extremely liberal definition of what is careless and reckless is, you don't even have to be doing anything against the regs for them to use it against you and bust you on it.
 
Or maybe some people just don't like the definition of careless or reckless, because that is how they choose to operate?
 
mkosmo said:
10s won't tell you enough. Especially if the first bump is cumuogranite. And Bluetooth doesn't provide much bandwidth for much data. You want low precision, low bandwidth, or both? BT may limit you to both lol
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If the first bump is cumulogranite then there isn't a mystery to solve.
 
ircphoenix said:
So.... if you screw up doing something you're not supposed to and get fanged for it, you're gonna have evidence of you doing something you're not supposed to be doing... and that's the argument against?
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Yep. No reason to help out opposing legal counsel... And since you had it, if you destroy it, it won't bode well. Why would you ever voluntarily incriminate yourself?
 
A CVR, DVR and/or FDR in GA aircraft would make MAJORITY of crash investigations very easy and simplify it for the NTSB so that they don't need to use the line "probable cause" but instead replace it with "definite cause" and blame the pilot.
Would it help GA safety? IMHO, no. We already know that us pilots make boneheaded mistakes that kill us. I personally do not believe that having proof would improve the odds.
However, there might be a teaching moment in all this. (just like the Canadian or Australian anti-smoking commercials) Drastic/dramatic footage of a pilot making a deadly mistake could jolt some pilots' ego and make us realize that we all are vulnerable. It could potentially save lives.

Anecdote to illustrate my last point: while training for my IR under the hood, my CFII had me do slow flight and we were at the bottom of the white arc, nose up high. My CFII asked for a left turn and a right turn and commented "you handle the controls very gently and remain coordinated, I like that" to which I replied without thinking "I don't want to die".
 
mkosmo said:
Yep. No reason to help out opposing legal counsel... And since you had it, if you destroy it, it won't bode well. Why would you ever voluntarily incriminate yourself?
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I guess I was raised to be responsible for my actions.

If I screw up, I should be held accountable for that screw up. I don't duck responsibility. I own it.

And if I ROYALLY screw up and get myself killed or injured, I certainly would like the NTSB to know HOW I screwed up, so others can learn from it.
 
ircphoenix said:
I guess I was raised to be responsible for my actions.

If I screw up, I should be held accountable for that screw up. I don't duck responsibility. I own it.

And if I ROYALLY screw up and get myself killed or injured, I certainly would like the NTSB to know HOW I screwed up, so others can learn from it.
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:yeahthat:
 
I don't think it'll sell unless it takes selfies and posts to Facebook every hour.
 
Of course I hold myself accountable. Doesn't mean that the government should have a free lens in to my life and actions.
 
This is a great idea I think if a little is good a lot must be better. I think we should connect probes to the pilot as well during the flight to monitor their systems as well. Hook up an EKG, brain monitor, blood samples... It's all good.
 
I've flown an handful of airplanes with flight data recorders and never once has the data jumped out of the storage media and into the public eye. The government owned most of it to begin with but what was mine is still all mine.

Nauga,
who says, "records on!"
 
(nearly) Useless solution to a (nearly) non-problem. There are lot's of things we can do, and many not worth the effort. We could, literally, record parameters on skate-boards, given current tech. I think we'd find that falling off was a large percentage of the accidents causing injuries.

Nothing to learn in design/engineering airplanes from it - it a model starts breaking or behaving badly, the clues are usually forthcoming (MU2, Bonanza).
 
FDR and CVR in GA could help investigations conclude quicker and lead to more specific probable cause findings. The two benefits I see would be some closure for the friends and relatives and better training materials for those of us who are interested in learning from other pilot's misfortunes and mistakes.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
On a new aircraft it'd be a negligible cost. I'm not saying retrofit the entire GA fleet, I'm saying on newly built GA aircraft.
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This is very naive thinking. You can't wave off the total cost of retrofitting all new airplanes in perpetuity as "negligible." You have to quantify the benefit side of the equation. What is the probability of getting useful things for NTSB investigations and what is the value of that information compared to the cost of all those recorders? (Never mind the privacy debate, which is not unimportant.)

The poster child for this is car air bags. Sounds like a good idea, right? I got a set of gummint numbers once that worked out to over $20M per net life saved (people claimed saved minus people killed by air bags). How many little kids' lives in Africa do you think you could save for $20M? Easily thousands. The new requirement for backup cameras in cars is probably another one of these stupidities. Many millions per life saved; millions that could save many lives if they were deployed properly.
 
Wow... We are truly lost without SZ, aren't we.

I'm sure we can find people opposed to airbags, backup cameras, seatbelts, safety glass, antilock brakes, disc brakes, computer controlled fuel and ignition management, crumple zones, and every other innovation to have ever hit the automobile. Wherever this thread is going, I find its connection to the OP to be tenuous at best.

OP did not ask why government isn't forcing this crap down everyone's throat--that's the spin others have since added to this topic. OP simply asked why, with the state of the art being what it is, we don't see some simple recorders standard in new aircraft. It's kind of like asking why the crap we put into space is so outdated compared to the stuff we put in our pockets.

As was already pointed out, many pilots are inadvertently introducing this logging and recording technology when they bring personal electronic devices onboard and that is probably the way it's going to go with GA for some time. All ideological opinions aside, everything that goes into the panel of a certified plane needs to be qualified and approved and there's very little incentive to develop this technology for GA aircraft at this time. Form an engineering perspective, you could very easily and affordably slap some flash-based device into a new plane for roughly $100 worth of parts and it would be infinitely better than the nothing that takes its place currently. From a regulatory standpoint, however, you open a can of worms to determine minimum performance specs and from a legal standpoint you just know some grieving widow, son, or corporation is going to sue the pants off you the instant one of these recorders fails, no matter how much you've done to disclaim it and no matter how irrelevant said lost data is to the investigation.

So in short, OP, society sucks and that's why you can't have nice things in GA or cool guns in CA. :p
 
ollopa said:
Form an engineering perspective, you could very easily and affordably slap some flash-based device into a new plane for roughly $100 worth of parts and it would be infinitely better than the nothing that takes its place currently.
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I think many airplanes with modern avionics already have this kind of recorder. Heck, many new cars record data. I just read about a motor vehicle accident they suspect is a suicide. They're going to try to analyze the chip in the car to see if he was stepping on the accelerator or the brakes before he ran into the concrete structure.
 
nauga said:
On behalf of the flight test community I beg to differ.

Nauga,
the community organizer ;)
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Nah, I'm thinking instrumentation appropriate for flight testing in a new or modified design isn't necessary or relevant in production GA airplanes.

And I'm thinking about simple GA aircraft, below the turbine class; they just don't have much new data to reveal about failure modes. If it wasn't caught in the certification testing, the problem will reveal clearly enough without data recording - like V-tail Bonanza issue, or MU-2 operations.

Appareo systems has cool stuff you can buy, and like others have posted, some boxes already in place have recording ability. Anyone that interested can go for it, but as a significant source of data, for influencing design or fixes to GA aircraft, I think it'd be of small value.
 
Everskyward said:
I think many airplanes with modern avionics already have this kind of recorder. Heck, many new cars record data. I just read about a motor vehicle accident they suspect is a suicide. They're going to try to analyze the chip in the car to see if he was stepping on the accelerator or the brakes before he ran into the concrete structure.
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Chesapeake guy?
 
Mtns2Skies said:
Well that escalated quickly.

I was thinking from a crash standpoint to advance the safety and engineering of GA
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The "safety and engineering of GA" for most of the fleet was accomplished in the '60s and '70s. There's not much going on in present times either. According to GAMA, total deliveries for piston singles in 2015 was 1,056 aircraft.

This idea is exactly what regulation focused elected and non elected officials yearn for, a requirement that sounds to the public to be eminently necessary. Who would vote against such a prudent measure?

As someone said, the cause of small aircraft crashes is usually quite clear to investigators. As long as pilots continue to run out of fuel and blunder into IMC while flying VFR, those two reasons for most aircraft crashes will provide obvious clues in a relatively short time span.
 
nauga said:
I've flown an handful of airplanes with flight data recorders and never once has the data jumped out of the storage media and into the public eye. The government owned most of it to begin with but what was mine is still all mine.

Nauga,
who says, "records on!"
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Until something happens and the NTSB and/or FAA release it as part of an investigation.
 
EdFred said:
I'm not sure why the next generation wants everyone to know what they are doing at every moment. I prefer my privacy. It's my life, not everyone else's.
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On the kinds of planes I fly for fun all those electronic gadgets and do dads are about as useful as an anchor.
 
You could start by just recording what your transponder is pumping out after Jan 1, 2020. One of my ADS-B predictions was that trolls would start monitoring the ADS-B out data and selling it to news outlets after large newsworthy events.
 
There are any number of ways to record a flight. I just don't happen to want it. What you see as an advantage, and may help in closure for those left behind, I find it might jeopardize the estate. Remember that in our litigious society, lawsuits abound and any data left behind could become evidence in a civil trial.
I flew with a guy who, prior to shutting down, he would wipe his GPS. He was so anal about this it was a note right above "Close your flight plan.". It seems like a good idea to me. I wonder if I can find a factory reset feature for my car's computer.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
@G-Man Care to weigh in?
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Just saw this...
Without addressing the merits of the various arguments; yes, Appareo Systems makes the V1000 Flight Data Recorder. It's a cockpit recorder with video, audio, and flight instrument data recorded into a hardened unit. The primary market is helicopters, where I believe it is mandated for certain types of flying. It works fine in fixed-wing and is a nice unit. More info at http://www.appareo.com/aviation/flight-data-monitoring/ and http://www.appareo.com/aviation/flight-data-monitoring/alerts
[Disclosure: I work for Appareo Systems, in a different division.]
 
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