Aviation industry in standoff over making ‘black boxes’ deployable and able to share data faster

Three years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s unresolved disappearance sparked efforts to implement new flight-data recorder technology, the global aviation community is deadlocked over the best way to ensure investigators will have timely access to vital clues in future crashes. Technical, marketing and jurisdictional disputes—pitting Boeing and US regulators against Airbus and European authorities—have blocked consensus over prospective changes to today’s “black boxes” that help unravel accidents. The most prominent disagreement involves “deployable” recorders. Boeing’s position is that the deployable technology is unnecessary partly because there are so few crashes of big jets, and the recorders are expensive to maintain and potentially hazardous. <br/>