A Boeing 737 MAX-9 aircraft at a factory in Washington, USA (Photo: Reuters).
Reuters quoted US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy on January 7 as saying that authorities could not collect data from the cockpit voice recorder because the data had been overwritten because no one turned off the system after the incident.
Currently, cockpit voice recorders in the US can only record for up to two hours, after which they begin to overwrite and erase previous data. This is much shorter than the 25 hours of recording that European cockpit voice recorders can record for aircraft manufactured after 2021.
"A lot was going on on the plane. It was very chaotic. The cockpit voice recorder switch was not pulled down after the incident. The maintenance team did it later, but it was past the two-hour mark and all the data was erased," Homendy said.
US plane carrying 180 people had windows blown out in mid-air
On the afternoon of January 5, an Alaska Airlines plane carrying 177 passengers and crew exploded due to a partial pressure failure. The incident caused the plane to lose a window and a large hole appeared in the fuselage. The plane later landed safely, with only a few passengers injured.
The plane's two black boxes (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) were sent to the NTSB for data extraction to serve the investigation, but the cockpit voice recorder's data was erased.
"We found the part that came off the Alaska Airlines plane in a teacher's backyard in Portland on January 7," Homendy added.
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