The Washington Post
By Ashley Halsey III
September 14 at 7:57 PM
Far beneath the rolling blue Indian Ocean, at a depth where sunlight turns a washed-out gray, very possibly sit 239 people still safely buckled in their seats, and a device about the size of a cantaloupe that could tell why they died.
Finding that melon-sized black box from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will take a near miracle, but if it is brought to the surface in a year or two — or, perhaps, three or four — there is a chance it will end up in a nondescript office building a few hundred yards off Independence Avenue in Washington.
There are only a handful of top-flight laboratories in the world that decode the mysteries of disaster, among them are one in Paris and another that’s two hours west of Berlin. But there is none better than that on the fifth floor at 490 L’Enfant Plaza SW, a building unadorned with any indication that it is home of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
This is where some of the world’s most vexing aviation mysteries have been explored. Was TWA Flight 800 brought down by an explosion or a missile? Was the EgyptAir 990 crash a malfunction or the act of a suicidal pilot? What caused Alaska Airlines Flight 261 to roll belly up and plunge into the Pacific?
After every big airline disaster — most recently, the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 going down over Ukraine in July — the first quest of investigators is to recover the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.
Sometimes, as with EgyptAir, they reveal everything. Other times, as with Alaska Air, they point the way. Rarely do they offer up no clue at all.
‘Little wake turbulence’
Last words from American Airlines Flight 587, Nov. 12, 2001. The plane hits turbulent wake from another aircraft after takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. As the pilot and first officer struggle to control the plane, the cockpit voice recorder captures this conversation:
“Little wake turbulence, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Max power.” [Spoken in strained voice.]
“You all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Let’s go for power, please.”
“Holy ----.”
“What the hell are we into. We’re stuck in it.”
“Get out of it. Get out of it.”
The plane crashes into the Bell Harbor neighborhood in Queens, killing all 260 on board and five people on the ground.
Why called black boxes?
The black boxes aboard commercial jets are a marriage of two elements: a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder. What the first records is obvious, but the second is required to collect a minimum of 88 data points, and most modern planes actually record hundreds or more than a thousand.
They spread through the plane like the capillaries in your body, tracking the plane’s performance on matters major and minuscule.
In the NTSB lab, bins filled with every type of black box in use are stacked in one corner, and they have one thing in common.
They’re not black. They are orange.
Joseph Kolly, director of the NTSB’s Office of Research and Engineering, explains that black box is a term of art engineers use to describe any electronic device that has an input and output. When the details of its inner workings are of little interest, they are considered “black” or “unknown.” Although experts actually do know how they work, that’s not as important as the inputs and outputs.
‘I rely on God’
Last words from EgyptAir Flight 990, Oct. 31, 1999. After the plane departs New York’s John F. Kennedy International for Cairo, cockpit crew members encounter unusual behavior from Gamil Al-Batouti, a reserve pilot on the flight. The cockpit voice recorder captures the following.
Batouti: “I rely on God.”
Batouti: “I rely on God.”
“What’s happening? What’s happening?
Batouti: “I rely on God.”
[Sound of numerous thumps and clinks continue for about 15 seconds. A high-low tone emergency warning sound goes off and continues to the end of the recording.]
Batouti: “I rely on God.”
“What’s happening, Gamil? What’s happening?”
“What is this? What is this? Did you shut [off] the engine?”
Batouti: “It’s shut.”
“Pull with me.”
“Pull with me.”
“Pull with me.”
The pilot pulls back on the controls in a futile attempt to right the plane. It crashes into the Atlantic about 60 miles south of Nantucket Island, killing the 217 people on board.
“The recorders were pretty critical to that crash,” Kolly said. “We saw a healthy aircraft being flown into the ocean, and the things we heard in the cockpit we interpreted as one of the flight crew engaging in an intentional act.”
Though an NTSB investigation usually takes a couple of years, the people in Kolly’s lab move fast. Their goal is to analyze data from the two recorders and get a report out to investigators at the crash site within 24 hours.
“We want to guide them when they’re there,” he said. “We want to say, ‘Focus on this. It sounds like it might be this. It looks like it might be that.’ ”
When the crew seems oblivious in the runup to a disaster, “We will immediately talk to our investigators in the field and say, ‘There are the questions that you need to ask that plane crew, while their memories are fresh.’ ”
‘They want to get in here’
Last words from United Airlines Flight 93, Sept. 11, 2001. Flying from Newark to San Francisco, the plane was hijacked. Ziad Jarrah, who had trained as a pilot, took control and turned the plane in the direction of Washington. The passengers, who had learned of other hijackings that morning from telephone calls with relatives, rebelled against their hijackers. This is an abridged portion of what the cockpit voice recorder captured. The italic portions were translated from Arabic.
“A fight?”
“Yeah?”
“They want to get in here. Hold. Hold from the inside. Hold from the inside. Hold.”
“There are some guys. All those guys.”
“Let’s get them.”
“Is that it? Shall we finish it off?”
“No. Not yet.”
“When they all come, we finish it off.”
“In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die.”
“Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?”
“Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.”
“Down, down.”
“Pull it down. Pull it down.”
“No.”
“Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.”
The plane crashes into a filed near Shanksville, Pa., killing all 44 people on board.
Work treated sacredly
The boxes can be whisked to Washington from anywhere in the world in a matter of hours aboard a government jet. Unless the box was damaged or destroyed by an uncontrolled fire — think of the World Trade Center — there’s plenty to work with, even if it has been submerged for years.
The lab has a drying oven to deal with water-soaked elements and microscopes to scan each memory card. The FDR cards store 25 hours of flight history. The VCR cards in the most modern black boxes record two hours of cockpit conversation.
Damaged cards usually can be repaired, or their chips moved to a new, functional memory board. If the VCR memory is intact, it heads into a secure room where few people ever gain entry.
Listening to the final words of pilots who are about to die is treated as a scared duty at the NTSB laboratory. For a major disaster, a handful of people are called together — a lab chief, someone from the airline (often a person who can identify the voices in the cockpit), a representative of the plane’s manufacturer and other key parties. They slip on headphones, sit before individual computer screens and begin to listen, not just to voices, but to every noise that was recorded.
No one is allowed to take a copy of the recording from the room. Notes are taken on color-coded slips of paper that are collected before anyone leaves the room. The NTSB will issue transcripts in its final report, but release of the audio by the agency is forbidden.
“If there ever was a leak, there are only about five people who have listened to this thing, so it has to be one of the five,” Kolly said.
The mystery of Flight 370
The airplane that disappeared in March — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — mesmerized world attention, and more than a little of the focus fell on the failure of its black box to provide more help in the search.
When planes go down in the ocean, a pinger attached to the black box sends out a signal that sounds like a grandfather clock ticking for about 30 days before its battery dies. Kolly wants to see the battery life extended, and he likes a new type of black box designed to break from the plane and float, sending out a signal, when a plane crashes.
The NTSB has scheduled a public forum in October to explore new ways of locating black boxes.
It’s not clear that any of those things would solve the mystery of Flight 370. There has been speculation that a cabin depressurization knocked the crew and passengers unconscious for most of their long detour somewhere into the Indian Ocean. Will just the last two hours of flight on the voice recorder provide enough to say what caused the crash? And if the plane had no problems other than depressurization, will it tell more than it was flying on auto pilot and ultimately ran out of fuel?
“There’s a high probability if they find it, it will be usable,” Kolly said. “Whether or not it contains usable information, we don’t know.”
Ashley Halsey reports on national and local transportation.
- Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com
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