By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Friday finalized a rule to require cockpit voice recorders to retain 25 hours of data for all new passenger airplanes in 2027 compared with the current two-hour loop.
The National Transportation Safety Board has been pushing for the change since 2018, and the United States is behind much of the world in the requirement for commercial planes.
The voice recorder captures transmissions and sounds in the cockpit, including the pilots’ voices and engine noises and can be crucial in understanding why airplane crashes occur. The FAA rule, which was proposed in 2023, takes effect immediately but gives some smaller aircraft one to three years to comply. Congress separately passed legislation in 2024 that will require all passenger airplanes to be retrofitted with the 25-hour recorders by 2030.
The FAA said the rule “provides accident investigators, aircraft operators, and civil aviation authorities with substantially more CVR data to help determine the probable causes of incidents and accidents and prevent future incidents and accidents.”
Europe has required new airplanes to collect 25 hours of cockpit voice recordings since 2021. In 2016, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopted a new standard calling for the installation of recorders capable of recording the last 25 hours on all new aircraft starting in 2021.
After one near-miss runway incident in 2023, the NTSB said the cockpit voice recordings in both planes were overwritten and not recovered because the devices record only two hours.
The 2018 NTSB recommendation stems from an incident at San Francisco in which the flight crew of an Air Canada Airbus A320 was cleared to land on a set runway, but instead lined up with a parallel taxiway. The plane descended to an altitude of 100 feet and then overflew an airplane on the taxiway and subsequently overflew a second airplane before climbing.
When cockpit voice recorders were first implemented in 1966, they could only record 30 minutes, the FAA said.
(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio)
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