That model of the 737 is quite modern. All the avionics have been updated (hence the auto-crash feature.)
And going by discussions on a forum frequented by far many more pilots, none of them seem to know how to actually turn it off.
You aren't understanding what happened with the CVR. The pilots did not turn it off, it was left on after the plane landed and the data was overwritten. If you just leave it running, it starts to overwrite the data after two hours. The data was erased because it was left running, not because someone disabled it.
If, as stated earlier, it turns off automatically when the aircraft is shut down, that means that someone turned it back on after it had been shut down automatically. It doesn't matter whether pilots know how to disable it, it wasn't disabled, the problem was that somebody turned it on when it should not have been turned on.
Who do you think turned it on, a poltergeist or a human?
CountZeroFull Member<br />More loose bolts found in United Airlines 737’s:
surely this means that all Boeing planes are going to be grounded, if at oeast 5 737 Max9s have loose or missing bolts it means other models will have too
Accident was at night wasn't it? Maybe it's as stupid as the APU was kept on after the landing to keep the lights on inside the aircraft. Doesn't have to be a malicious act as all the assumptions seem to be.
I haven’t seen any preliminary accident reports yet, so nothing I’m saying is based on official information.
When it landed, this aircraft was quite capable of moving under its own power, safely. If it was me, I would probably have taxied to the terminal to offload passengers via the jet bridge - far safer than evacuating by the slides, which will hurt someone.
When we park, ground electrical services get plugged in, and the aircraft stays powered. They rarely actually get turned off. The pilots first priority would’ve been safely getting the passengers off, then there would have been an avalanche of emergency services, managers, engineers, etc.
If, as stated, the CVR was overwritten due to the aircraft remaining powered, that is completely plausible and normal. The CVR is there to help work out what happened in disasters, not to trap every conversation on every minor issue.
@kimbers I assume whatever of that model type have the plug option will need to be checked
As for existing faults on that window, once again that is entirely possible to have happened legally and completely within the rules. We carry snags every day, including door sensors. There will be a procedure in place. The ide@ that the pilots were hatching some Machiavellian plot to illegally fly a dangerous aircraft likely to kill them both is a little far fetched and not understanding of how these things work.
or maybe because a big hole had appeared in the plane at 5000 metres in the air, normal procedure just wasn't followed; adrenaline, fear and soiled underwear can disrupt your routine
To be fair @Trekex8 it appears to be a one man obsession. Or it could be the poltergeist
The ide@ that the pilots were hatching some Machiavellian plot to illegally fly a dangerous aircraft likely to kill them both is a little far fetched and not understanding of how these things work.
Nobody said that. In the U.S., it's very easy to get sued and there will be lawyers all over this looking to file against anyone involved in the chain of decisions that lead to the incident. Even if the pilots did nothing wrong (which seems very likely to me), they can be bankrupted by the legal fees associated with a lawsuit. Their union knows this and that's a large part of the reason they oppose the use of CVR data in court. Even if they did absolutely nothing wrong, a recording of them discussing the fault pre-flight or ignoring a warning light after takeoff is probably all that lawyers need to launch a class-action lawsuit against them. "Forgetting" to turn the CVR after a serious incident is an easy way to reduce your chances of being bankrupted with legal fees while giving you plausible deniability. Pilots aren't stupid, their union has explained to them how damaging CVR data is and why it's essential to try to keep it out of evidence.
The airline will absolutely, definitely be getting sued over this. It's hard to explain to a jury of ordinary people why you kept an aircraft in service despite a known flaw and then that flaw turned out to be a door that blew off in flight. The airline will settle out of court, they will look ridiculous if they try to fight it in court. Not having the CVR data available makes their lawyers' jobs just that little bit easier. Very convenient for them.
Not sure why there’s an obsession with the CVR and trying to hang the crew?
I'm not trying to hang the crew, I'm saying that it's suspicious that the CVR data was overwritten. I think the crew probably did nothing wrong but, even if you did nothing wrong, it makes life much easier for the crew and the airline if that data is lost. If it's this easy to lose CVR data then the system needs to be improved to make sure it's not lost so easily, that hasn't happened because the pilots' union does not want CVR data available at all.
Yesterday we had pilots saying it was impossible for the crew to have deleted the data. Today we are hearing that it's really easy to delete the data by mistake. Which is it, impossible or trivial?
Also, running of the CVR has no bearing on that of the flight data recorder.
Did anybody say it was? Don't make things up.
Why would anyone want to trawl a CVR for a technical issue? They're there for accident investigation purposes. Techies pull from QARs which are pure digital objects in the cockpit / avionics bays & keep data for days, if not weeks. More like a car ECU's diagnostic log. The previous incidents will be in the QARs, checked out by ground technicians and entered in the technical log. Nobody in the flight crew will want to hide anything - it's not meant to be a blame culture.
This was quite an interesting thread until the tinfoil conspiracy shite.
There are at least 3 fully qualified actual real-life airline pilots - with experience on that type of aircraft - commenting on this thread.
But no, better to go with the random conspiracy crap and just dismiss any of the actual real expertise as someone who is probably In On It.
🙄
Nobody said that. In the U.S., it’s very easy to get sued and there will be lawyers all over this looking to file against anyone involved in the chain of decisions that lead to the incident. Even if the pilots did nothing wrong (which seems very likely to me), they can be bankrupted by the legal fees associated with a lawsuit.
1. There’s no point on suing people who will be bankrupted by legal fees.
2. Do US unions not cover legal fees? I thought that was one of the selling points of a union?
Even if they did absolutely nothing wrong, a recording of them discussing the fault pre-flight or ignoring a warning light after takeoff is probably all that lawyers need to launch a class-action lawsuit against them.
but you’d likely get far more money by suing the airline; although I think even if the airline is shown to be at fault since nobody received significant physical harm there’s probably not that strong a case. Obviously in the US a strong case and significant harm are optional but I’m not imagining is being that compelling a case for 177 small compensation claims - which would likely be settled long before a court room.
“Forgetting” to turn the CVR after a serious incident is an easy way to reduce your chances of being bankrupted with legal fees while giving you plausible deniability. Pilots aren’t stupid, their union has explained to them how damaging CVR data is and why it’s essential to try to keep it out of evidence.
pilots work with extensive checklists to help them slide Al with unusual situations. Not following the checklist is the sort of thing that gets you in bother. It’s possible they followed the checklist but the checklist has a missing - if the aircraft has been involved in a significant incident but parks normally - follow page X immediately.
The airline will absolutely, definitely be getting sued over this. It’s hard to explain to a jury of ordinary people why you kept an aircraft in service despite a known flaw and then that flaw turned out to be a door that blew off in flight. The airline will settle out of court, they will look ridiculous if they try to fight it in court. Not having the CVR data available makes their lawyers’ jobs just that little bit easier. Very convenient for them.
but your logic is that someone, a pilot, an aircraft engineer, etc intentionally left the recorder running to protect the airline, from a conversation that may or may not have taken place, which may or may not have been harmful to a jury’s perception in a case that will almost certainly not go to court never mind a jury? FWIW I don’t think Alaska would look ridiculous if they went to court - they’d bring in experts who would assure the jury that fault warnings happen all the time and there were no actual symptoms of a fault so it seems like a false alarm and never has any aircraft had this failure so it was not a forseable warning… they will either bring Boeing, as the engineering experts on the hardware, to say they did everything right, or they will cross sue Boeing for the fault.
The pilots lives were endangered by the issue, which if there is a design or maintenance fault the Union will see as a priority. Evidence that the aircraft survived because of the pilots not inspite of the them is actually good for the Union. Lots of people were getting on and off that aircraft to inspect / take pictures etc - the most plausible explanation is that the complete shutdown was not performed immediately because of that.
Nobody in the flight crew will want to hide anything – it’s not meant to be a blame culture.
In the U.S., it is a blame culture. You can face lawsuits even if you didn't do anything wrong. When things go wrong, the company's lawyers blame the workers. The union lawyers blame the company. The reason that the CVR limit in the U.S. is only two hours is because the pilots' union oppose the use of CVRs full-stop and will not agree to extending the duration of the recordings (this is their official policy that they publicly state). So, what we have is a situation where CVR recordings will be lost after two hours, so pilots who follow standard operating procedures and keep the aircraft systems running after landing will automatically erase those recordings.
Yesterday people were jumping up and down about it being impossible for pilots to erase the recordings. Now it turns out that the pilots' union and airlines have insisted on standard operating procedures that ensure those recordings are erased. And they oppose the really simple remedy used in other countries of just extending the duration of the recordings so they aren't immediately lost. And, they publicly state that this policy is because they don't want the recordings used in court. There's no conspiracy theory there, just the publicly stated policies of the pilots' union responding to a blame culture.
your logic is that someone, a pilot, an aircraft engineer, etc intentionally left the recorder running to protect the airline, from a conversation that may or may not have taken place, which may or may not have been harmful to a jury’s perception in a case that will almost certainly not go to court never mind a jury?
Based on a comment from a forum member who I think is a commercial pilot that the CVRs in modern aircraft automatically turn off when the engines are shut down. It seems that that comment was misleading. If that comment was correct, then someone would have had to have restarted the recorders. Now we have other people contradicting that pilot and saying the the recorders will keep running if the aircraft is connected to external power even if the engines are shut down.
This is the policy of the Teamster's Union who represent some pilots in the U.S. They don't want their members facing lawsuits, including from the airlines.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, representing Atlas Air pilots, makes clear why they’re objecting to 25 hour cockpit voice recordings.
They claim that pilots have an expectation of privacy in the cockpit.
They believe that pilots ‘wouldn’t have agreed’ to any recording in the first place (as though it was their decision right) had they known these recordings would ever be made public.
Pilots might break airline rules, and voice recording would help prove their guilt
In a criminal matter, the FBI isn’t restricted in how it can use recording (umm… good?)
I think it's worth remembering that the US is a really really ****ed up place:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/deepwater-horizon-prosecution/
I can see some parallels between airline pilots and drilling supervisors. On paper they are the ones in charge but ultimately they are subject to the whims of upper management. If they exercise any judgment that would result in loss of earnings for the company it would be career suicide.
That doesn't stop management then trying to hold them 100% accountable if anything goes wrong.
I have no idea if that is the case here but I would expect people in the US to have a very much more paranoid outlook than those employed in Europe.
Too easy to become a Google expert though isn't it? Looking for 'fault' and either implying or explicitly apportioning blame and malfeasance. It's the very reason why good safety cultures are so hard to maintain.
Anyway, I'm off to the Ukraine thread for more defence hot takes from our resident OSINT experts...
NTSB briefing last night was really good. They exude professionalism, openness, humility and are clearly a close-knit team.
Key takeaway is that the door transited upwards releasing the locks, the guide tracks fractured (after it moved upwards), the bolts preventing it moving upwards have not been found.
Now we have other people contradicting that pilot and saying the the recorders will keep running if the aircraft is connected to external power even if the engines are shut down.
the NTSB implied it was an engineer (not the pilot)’s job to shutdown and preserve the recorder, they don’t seem to suggest that they were surprised it was not done as quickly as you expected. I am sure you will now suggest that Alaska specifically delayed the engineer.
I suspect the pilots Union is more worried about the recording getting used in sexual harassment and other “non safety” related matters than a pilot being personally sued for safely landing a plane after a mechanical fault.
Thols - Boeing/airbus big/small, new/old FAA/EASA - there is no industry standard for CVRs and how/when they record. <br /><br />
Im afraid you are also way off with regard to the legality of what/when can be done with faults.
You aren’t understanding what happened with the CVR.
I understand exactly what happened with the CVR. It's on a continuous 2 hour recording loop, and it never got turned off.
However you seem hell bent on saying that the pilots (or 'others') deliberately left it on, and mis-reading/understanding posts that say the pilots likely have no idea how they'd turn the CVR on/off. It's an item that they check is working, but don't actually know how to control, as they have no need to control it.
Would you be so hung up on the CVR if the flight landed 2h1m after take off, so nothing recorded pre-take off was till present?
Or would you then be claiming the pilots deliberately kept flying just long enough to have those conversations deleted?
Yesterday people were jumping up and down about it being impossible for pilots to erase the recordings.
Who said that? I just had a quick skim through to see and all I could find were pilots saying you can't disable it and / or have no idea how you would re-start it to deliberately overwrite it.
In the absence of any other information like does the APU count as an engine in the statement " aircraft pause the CVR after engine shutdown automatically." then the more likely scenario seems that they parked somewhere unusual, didn't get connected to shore power, and left the APU running to keep the lights on whilst evacuating and the plane was busy with people.
And surely actively doing something that would be difficult to pass off as a mistake to overwrite the data would be some sort of gross negligence and sackable?
Who said that?
Flaperon
Full Member
More modern aircraft pause the CVR after engine shutdown automatically.
It would make sense that different models of aircraft and manufacturers would do things differently.
However, what is notable is that in the U.S., the CVR data is going to be automatically deleted unless the aircraft systems are shut down fairly promptly after landing. In this case, the airline knew that there was some kind of fault with the aircraft and decided to not fly it over water. Surely the pilots had been informed and must have agreed that the aircraft was safe to fly. It's possible that the cabin pressure warning light came on after takeoff but that the crew decided to ignore it based on the earlier incidents that did not seem serious enough to ground the aircraft. That chain of decisions could have had fatal consequences so hearing what the pilots discussed preflight and after takeoff contributes to understanding why the decision was made to keep operating the aircraft. Sure, the physical evidence is more important but understanding why the crew made the decisions they did is also important. Having a CVR system that automatically deletes the data before there is time to recover it is ridiculous (seriously, what an utterly bizarre system), but it is there because the pilots' union do not want that data recorded in the first place. (That's their officially stated policy.)
I’m not trying to hang the crew, I’m saying that it’s suspicious that the CVR data was overwritten.
It really isn't.
Thols - watch that ntsb video someone posted a little earlier. It contains answers to some of your speculation about what errors or alarms were received - only the voice recording is not available. The data recording is available. It also explains the “don’t fly over water” rule was Alaska’s own rule, exceeded the FAA requirements, and that so far they have not found any correlation between the previous cabin pressure warnings and this failure. She also explains the cabin pressure system has triple redundancy and FAA permit flying with one of the systems out of action.
I don’t think anyone is arguing on this thread that 25h recorders would not be better. But one of the primary purposes of a voice data recorder is to provide evidence of the cockpit discussions when the crew are no longer here to do so. In this case, whilst there was an inflight emergency it was safely resolved so the crew are here to give their own account of what they did and did not do.
Thol how would you feel if your employer had a microphone that recorded your every word while at work, and didn't have any kind of failsafe way to ensure it was deleted at regular intervals?
the crew are here to give their own account of what they did and did not do.
In some cases, it's in the personal interest of the crew that their conversation not be recorded and it's in the public interest that it should be. Pilots are human and sometimes they will lie to cover up their mistakes. The reason that the data erasure isn't unusual in this case is because it's standard practice to erase potential evidence - that's the pilots' unions' reason for opposing CVRs. That's nothing to do with the public interest, it's purely because pilots and airlines don't want their mistakes to be recorded. So yeah, not suspicious, everyone deletes evidence as standard practice.
Not applicable to this event but it amazes me that the cockpit and data recorders don't live stream. Yes it's a huge data volume but there are significant occurrences of the recorders being very hard to locate. You might not get everything as the transmission may fail in an emergency but anything is better than nothing till the actual recorders were located. Could be deleted a week after flight completion.
Not applicable to this event but it amazes me that the cockpit and data recorders don’t live stream.
Pilots' unions would never agree to that. Pilots would have to stop talking about which of the cabin crew has the cutest arse, who they banged last night, etc.
Thol how would you feel if your employer had a microphone that recorded your every word while at work, and didn’t have any kind of failsafe way to ensure it was deleted at regular intervals?
I've been involved in some discussions related to safety critical equipment that I would really prefer had been recorded.
It's better than having to rely on what someone says they said after something has gone wrong.
I’ve been involved in some discussions related to safety critical equipment that I would really prefer had been recorded.
It’s better than having to rely on what someone says they said after something has gone wrong.
Exactly. But a union is not a public safety agency, it's there to promote the interests of its members. When those are in conflict with public safety, unions undermine public safety because they are doing their job of protecting their members' interests. I'm all in favour of unions but they shouldn't have a veto over public safety issues.
Hang out in a lot of passenger airliner cockpits do you?
I've been drunk with quite a few pilots over the years. Most are decent enough, a few are utterly appalling.
I'm not sure if the union is trying to protect the pilots from public scrutiny, so much as the union is trying to protect pilots from the decisions they are being forced into by management.
Like I said, my experience is Oil and Gas but I don't see why the airline industry should be any different. Basically the Supervisors are 'responsible' for the safety of operations, but management can and does exert pressure on these supervisors to not make decisions that cost money.
And then try to claim the blame when things go wrong lies firmly at the feet of said supervisor.
In some cases, it’s in the personal interest of the crew that their conversation not be recorded and it’s in the public interest that it should be.
but there will also be instances where it’s in the crews interest (to echo irate them), and where if may be in the crews interest but not the airline or manufacturers interest. The union has also suggested that unnecessarily interfering in pilot privacy may have consequential effects on flight deck relationships and therefore communications which could impact safety. Whilst my assessment is probably different from theirs, there could be legal safeguards that might address the Union’s privacy concerns.
Pilots are human and sometimes they will lie to cover up their mistakes.
and this seems to be your working hypothesis here despite it being clear that a big bit of plane fell off and there being no hint from the NTSB that pilot or crew were in any way to blame! Accident investigators and law enforcement professionals are quite good at working out when someone is lying. Multiple crew interviewed separately with the data recorder as an impartial arbiter of who is closest to reality along with carefully worded questions and you will trip up many a lie. When the two stories seem to match 100% is a sign that they conspired to lie too.
of course people lie; they also get confused or mistaken after a traumatic experience too. But an audio recording of someone running through a checklist is not necessarily that helpful either - it’s not a police interview where people are asked to speak up or vocalise their response “for the benefit of the tape” not would any conversation that you think was incriminating about the cabin pressure system actually be so explicitly “wrong” that it would not be open to the crews “explanation” of what they meant anyway.
The reason that the data erasure isn’t unusual in this case is because it’s standard practice to erase potential evidence – that’s the pilots’ unions’ reason for opposing CVRs. That’s nothing to do with the public interest, it’s purely because pilots and airlines don’t want their mistakes to be recorded. So yeah, not suspicious, everyone deletes evidence as standard practice.
you can call it erasure and deleting evidence but that is misrepresenting the reality. The data automatically over writes unless there is an intervention (powerloss, crash detection etc). The verbs erase and delete suggest it’s a conscious action.
for someone who is so worried about litigation in the US you seem quite happy to throw around accusations that there was wrongdoing by the flight crew. You’ve persisted to do so when others have pointed out they probably followed the standard protocol and did nothing wrong. You’ve changed your allegations slightly but still say it’s suspicious and imply some degree of professional misconduct. If I happened to be an Alaskan Airlines Pilot with US attorneys swarming around me and your post came to my attention - you’d be regretting it.
The verbs erase and delete suggest it’s a conscious action.
The union policy is a conscious action. They've deliberately set up a system where it's nearly impossible to retain the data. There's a very simple solution - just increase the recording time to 25 hours. The unions do not want that because they don't want the recordings to be used in court. They aren't trying to be secret about this, the data erasure is a deliberate policy intended to erase the data. So, no, it's not a one-off attempt at destroying evidence, it's a systematic policy of destroying evidence.
I don’t really think it’s in the interests of the pilot to be onboard a plane that crashes.
No, but when it comes down to the interests of pilots coming into conflict with public safety, the union's responsibility is to pilots, not public safety. Sometimes they will align, sometimes they will be in conflict. A union will always prioritize the interests of its members over outsiders, that's the very purpose of its existence.
Why don’t they live stream? Easiest to hear why from an instructor pilot.
Yes, but on a plane, the interests of the members exactly and always coincide with public safety. Destroying evidence relating to a safety incident absolutely affects pilots as much as it does the self loading cargo. More so in fact because pilots are flying all the time & therefore a far more exposed to risk. Sorry, as others have said, you really seem to have gone a bit bat-shit crazy over this one.
Yes, but on a plane, the interests of the members exactly and always coincide with public safety.
When I was offshore it was never in my interest to be on a rig that blew up. However, it was in my interests to keep my job and sometimes that meant compromising my own safety in the interests of not raising a stink when management were pressurising everyone to act in ways that were unsafe.
You can always convince yourself the worst isn't going to happen.
