NTSB Boots American Airlines Off Jackson Hole Investigation

Posted on January 1, 2011 by Mike Danko

I often write about the NTSB's "party system." That's the NTSB's practice of asking airlines and manufacturers for help in determining an accident's cause.  If you ask me, it's a bit like asking the fox for help in figuring out what happened to the chickens. The party system allows industry participants to bias NTSB probable cause findings in their favor.

The NTSB allows party participants to handle evidence and perform certain engineering tests.  But one thing the NTSB insists on doing all by itself is downloading the data from an aircraft's black boxes.  The NTSB's labs in Washington DC are well equipped for that job, and it doesn't require any "help" from the airlines. 

But when it received the black boxes from the American Airlines 757 that ran off the runway at Jackson Hole, the NTSB quickly figured out that one of the black boxes had already been tampered with. The culprit turned out to be the trusted "party participant," American Airlines:
The Safety Board learned that the recorders were flown to Tulsa, Okla., where American Airlines technicians downloaded information from the DFDR. . .
That was too much industry "help" for even the NTSB to tolerate.  So the NTSB kicked American off the investigation.
Because maintaining and enforcing strict investigative protocols and procedures is vital to the integrity of our investigative processes, we have revoked the party status of American Airlines and excused them from further participation in this incident investigation.
Revoking a participant's "party status" is the NTSB's equivalent of the death penalty.  It is the harshest punishment the NTSB has the power to dole out. Still, it doesn't seem like much of a deterrent for next time.
 
Narrated video of landing shows spoilers, thrust reversers failing to deploy: 
 
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Is the Black Box Really Black?

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Mike Danko

Actually, the black box is day-glo orange.  And there are two of them.

The first is the Cockpit Voice Recorder. It records not just what is said in the cockpit, but also all the background mechanical sounds that provide clues to determining the chain of events leading to the accident.  The NTSB, along with other parties to the investigation, listens to the CVR, and then prepares a transcript of what it hears.  The transcript, or parts of the transcript, may be released to the public.  The actual recording, however, is almost never made public, mainly out of concerns over the crew's right to privacy.

After an accident, we will often hear on the news the crew's conversation with Air Traffic Control.  Sometimes the news media report that the recordings are the "cockpit tapes."  They're not.  What we are hearing is the recording made by Air Traffic Control.  So we are hearing only what the crew decided to transmit over the aircraft's radio.  We're not hearing what  the crew said amongst themselves.  Those discussions are on the CVR only.

The second "black box" is the Flight Data Recorder.  That box records things like the aircraft's heading, altitude, airspeed, and position of the aircraft's flight controls.  The information from the Flight Data Recorder frequently allows the NTSB to reconstruct the flight all the way up to the moment of impact.

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