New Black Boxes Will Be Easier to Track in Plane Crashes at Sea<br />In the event of a crash, the deployable recorder will be released from the plane, “triggered either by structural deformation in the fuselage or<br />because it starts to go under water,” Mr. Champion, of Airbus, said.<br />Aircraft will carry both a fixed and deployable version, each storing 25 hours of cockpit<br />voice — up from about two hours now — and data on thousands of flight parameters.<br />“The first alert will go off within three seconds after the beacon is deployed,”<br />said Blake van den Heuvel, director of air programs at DRS Technologies Canada.<br />“For the ones that don’t get recovered, I think you’ll find<br />that we have situations where we’ve had a midair collision of two tactical aircraft, two very, very small aircraft both approaching Mach 1, and in that event you have very little left of the aircraft,” he said.<br />When a plane crashes into water, a sonic beacon on the recorders sends out a signal for about 30 days.<br />After a multinational, multimillion-dollar search that lasted more than two years, the flight data<br />and cockpit voice recorders were finally recovered from the ocean floor.<br />But a new generation of recorders, announced this summer by Airbus<br />and set to roll out on new A350 airframes in late 2019, will make those boxes easier to retrieve.
