Charter Group Calls For CVRs On All Aircraft

The Air Charter Safety Foundation is urging all aircraft manufacturers to install cockpit voice recorders on all new aircraft and is calling for an affordable alternative for legacy aircraft and those not covered by current and future regulations. In a news release, the ACSF said it would like to see manufacturers come up with a standardized CVR system so economies of scale would bring the price down. Meanwhile, for those aircraft that won't be captured by a mandate, it's saying off-the-shelf systems like the Appareo Vision 1000 can provide a lot of data without the huge cost of certifying a system.

Certification requirements for crash survivability and underwater operation of the homing beacon make the certified systems costly, and that will deter those with older aircraft from retrofitting them. "A cost-effective solution is necessary for greater usage across many fleet types," the organization said. "Although this solution may not be certified, many systems have demonstrated some level of existing crash survivability with options for hardened recorder options." The NTSB has been calling for mandatory equipage of all commercial aircraft with recorders to provide speedy and comprehensive access to data in crash investigations.