Airbus is undertaking a series of consultations with European aerospace regulators about equipping its two largest aircraft with ejectable ‘black box’ flight recorders in order to make it easier to recover vital evidence following a disaster.
The Toulouse-based aircraft manufacturer has asked the European Aviation Safety Agency to approve the technology for its wide-bodied A380 and A350 planes.
This would make the planes “potentially” the first commercial models to use the technology, according to an Airbus spokesman (ejectable black-box technology has long been in use in military aircraft).
The spokesman said that the company has been working on different forms of data retrieval since an Air France crash in 2009, after which the black box was not recovered for two years.
He said: “The technology is there; I believe it is just a question of putting it in commercial aircraft.”
He added that the company has not ruled out using ejectable black boxes on its smaller A330 and A320 planes as well.
EASA is in the process of changing its certification rules to accommodate ejectable black boxes, and this process should be completed “relatively soon”.
A spokesman said: “It is an amendment, so it does not need to go through the full regulatory process.”