We need to get Admiral Cloudberg to join!
I would imagine the flight recorders keep recording as long as there’s any power left in the aircraft. So if there was a bird strike as they suspect, and if that caused a dual engine failure, the recorders should still work, right? So there has to be more to the story than a simple bird strike.
Says it in the article:
The discovery of the missing data from the budget airline’s Boeing 737-800 jet’s crucial final minutes was surprising and suggests all power, including backup, may have been cut, which is rare.
There has to be a lot of redundancy, yes. Batteries should keep the recorders running. The RAT should also deploy and provide power. At leat that’s what I would guess. Just waiting for some of the aviation experts on YouTube to make an analysis.
From my youtube understanding the 737-800 doesn’t have a RAT, instead using a battery system to power the DC bus, some controls, and minimal avionics. Also for some reason the FDR and CVR are powered only from the AC buses, and so would not have power in a two engine out scenario until the pilots manually started the APU and it came online. It also predates the requirement for said systems to have an independent backup battery.
This means things are still consistent with a staggered double bird strike or with a single bird strike followed by the pilots shutting down the wrong engine as well as some of the more out there theory’s.
Investigators might still be able to recover enough switch positions to figure out what happened in the air, but it’s going to be a hard investigation.
The major takeaway and factor that turned this from a major incident into a catastrophic one however is still that putting the localizer on a concrete reinforced berm for typhoon resistance is a major safety hazard.
