subject: After A Plane Crash A Lot Of Investigation Is Accomplished [print this page] Just like within any industry, if you want to improve your results then it is ever so imperative to figure out when, where, and why things have gone wrong in the past. Although relatively infrequent, problems, crashes, and emergency landings do happen in the aviation industry and as a result what happens immediately following these incidents has a direct relationship on the overall safety in the industry in the long run.
The two elements that the FAA factors in strongly when trying to determine the cause of a particular incident are the flight data recorder (little black box) and the cockpit voice recorder. Each of these items can furnish very telling information regarding what was occurring at the time of the incident, and while many of the issues that arise in the airline industry are a direct result of human error there are still a large number of occurrences that are mechanical at their base.
The little black box tells what the plane was doing every step of that flight, information about how the gauges were reading and what the engines were doing. Every aspect of the plane is being monitored through this flight data recorder every step of the way and can indicate when and if a mechanical error occurred. It also records anything that the pilot and co-pilot were doing such as accelerating, slowing down, or making adjustments. All of this information is imperative in determining how an incident came to occur.
Of course, the cockpit voice recorder just simply records any conversations or words that were occurring in the cockpit. Most of the airlines insist that pilots keep what is known as a sterile cockpit and keep things as focused on business as they can. They tend to discourage talking about personal matters as this might distract those flying the plane. On the other hand listening to the exchange between the pilot and copilot during a time of crisis can also help inspectors better understand what their perspective was on the problems that were arising at the time, helping to shed a different perspective on what was being done.
Whenever all of this information is gathered and is reasonably pieced together most airlines can usually determine what the cause of the situation was and whether it was caused by human error or mechanical breakdown. Even the loss of one life is too many and this is why the aviation industry proceeds to work hard to ensure that they fully investigate problems in the air so that they can better instruct their pilots on how to better handle the issues they may confront.
