No one’s pointed out yet that on most newer aircraft types, there is no CVR C/B or ERASE button on the flight deck. On Boeings, it’s in the underfloor E & E compartment – which pilots, (in my company, at least), are forbidden to enter in flight – (and the hatch is out in the cabin and not the cockpit).
Someone better informed that I am may choose to correct me, but as I understand it, the newer digital CVRs do NOT employ a 30 minute continuous loop tape. I’ve heard, second hand, I’ll admit, of a case where investigators were able to access the cockpit conversations from an incident that some occurred some hours before the aircraft landed.
This is a classic case of the ‘drip, drip’ technique, where the ante is slowly raised on an ever-tightening ratchet. (Look at drink driving and anti-smoking laws as two other examples.)
Most companies today use a QAR to monitor a thousand+ parameters on every flight. The QAR can be set to trigger an ‘event’ at any (company set) excursion from the desired flight profile. Currently, all such information is de-identified before leaving the flight safety department and is used only to monitor trends. However, already, if any such is excursion is grave or considered grossly dangerous, the pilot involved will be identified and called in to explain or to be retrained.
With the increasing availability of technology such as QARs and ‘real time’ downloads of data through ACARS, it’s a rather short step from where we are today to a Soviet style system where every crew will attend a post flight (or later) debrief to discuss every factor of the just completed flight. The pilots, (and unions, remember them?), of twenty years ago would have screamed blue murder and not stood for any of this. But we, a bit like the proverbial frog in the slowly heating water dish, just accept each click of the ratchet until the monitoring reaches the stage where on a day to day basis, some accountant might well dock you pay for a flight excursion that cost the company money.
On a not so day to day basis, litigants intent on finding someone to blame will be given access to the information of the FDR and CVR giving them three months to dissect every step you took in a quite possibly time-critical, even life-threatening situation and apportion blame.
It may well come to pass that in time, airline pilots will be forced to carry so much personal liability insurance that we will find ourselves in the same ridiculous situation some doctors are today – unable to practise some aspects of our profession because of insurance costs.
CVRs were only accepted by pilots when they were first introduced on the understanding that they would be used strictly as an aid to flight safety. As usual, time has blurred this understanding.
I often wonder how many other people, particularly high-flying executives, would be comfortable having a tape recorder (or camera, as many people want now) recording every moment of their working day and having that information made available to the police or lawyers should their company be involved in some form of litigation. Enron comes to mind..