Alaska 737 cockpit voice recorder data erasure renews safety debate

Re:Alaska 737 cockpit voice recorder data erasure renews saf... by sokoloff on Monday January 08, 2024 @04:32PM (#38918464)

Indeed the improvements in Cirrus training and communications has had a fleet-wide positive effect. I do think calling all of the no-life-lost deployments "saves" is disingenuous at best and more likely intentional shading of the truth. We don't call every airbag deployment without loss of life a "save" but we can draw database-wide conclusions about how many net lives were saved. In CAPS case, I don't believe the most accurate estimate of lives saved (vs a counterfactual where the airplanes did not have CAPS) is 258 across 126 events, as many of those occupants would have also survived the event without CAPS.

PS1: I saw what I think is that same ASF video ( https://youtu.be/fLlWf-Fk_YM?t=10m ). Really frustrating, especially how obvious it was an emergency to everyone except the two people on the radio (where the bulk of blame belongs to the pilot of N4975S.

PS2: One of my instructors was in CAPS Event #59. I talked to her afterwards; she was a fan. :)

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Re:Alaska 737 cockpit voice recorder data erasure renews saf... by tialaramex on Monday January 08, 2024 @08:29PM (#38921066)

I think the airbag comparison is a bit off, airbag deployment is automatic, so it may be that all the humans involved were like "This is fine" but you tripped the impact limits and so now there's an airbag deployment, CAPS isn't like that, a human has made the conscious decision to deploy.

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Re:Alaska 737 cockpit voice recorder data erasure renews saf... by sokoloff on Monday January 08, 2024 @09:00PM (#38921277)

Yes, but the outcome is still a statistical improvement over a non-zero baseline. Some of the stricken Cirrus would have been landed with zero fatalities (likely including my flight instructor's case).

Calling them all "saves" is overstating the incremental benefit.

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