Crash Recorder Interview with Steve Leaper

Crash Recorder Interview with Steve Leaper
Crash Recorder Interview with Steve Leaper
Video
February 02, 2016

Crash Recorder Interview with Steve Leaper

Crash-protected recorders have been used for decades to help investigators to determine what occurred during an accident involving an aircraft.

Curtiss-Wright has been designing and manufacturing crash-protected recorders since the 1950s.

In this interview, Steve Leaper, product manager for flight recorders, talks about the history and future of crash-protected recorders.

 

 

Download the Fortress Flight Recorder Brochure

Curtiss-Wright has been producing proven flight recorders for over 60 years. Our current Fortress product line meets all current and anticipated regulations and has several models to quickly meet the needs of a new or retrofit program. Read our Fortress brochure to learn more about the range of models currently available.

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Related Products and Services

Flight Recorders  
Flight Recorders

Compact, lightweight cockpit voice and flight data recorders designed to meet all current and anticipated regulations.

Flight Recorder Services  
Flight Recorder Services

Ensure ongoing serviceability, data analysis and downloads, replay hardware and software support, and ongoing training

Steve Leaper

Steve Leaper

Bids Manager

Steve Leaper works for Curtiss-Wright in the role of product manager for flight recorders and bids manager. He joined Curtiss-Wright in 1986, initially working with tape-based voice and flight data recorders. Steve has spent virtually all of his career working with the flight recorder product range, with extensive knowledge of the product range and requirements. Steve has held the positions of engineer, program manager and had key account management responsibility for Leonardo Helicopters, BAE Systems, and Collins Technologies (formerly Goodrich), amongst others, while also representing Curtiss-Wright at international committees such as ARINC and EUROCAE.

Video Transcript

Curtiss-Wright has been manufacturing flight data recorders since 1952. We introduced a wire-based recorder at that time and very limited data acquisition. Through the years we’ve produced a number of different types of recorders as more and more data is required, and we’re now looking at somewhere in the region of 48GB of information stored within a crash-protected memory environment.

The previous generation multi-purpose flight recorder which has been in the marketplace for the last ten years provides voice and data recording capability only. The Fortress recorder exceeds that and includes datalink recording which is the digital messages from ground to aircrew, and it also includes image recording. Fortress recorder provides a modular frontend so that we can change from an ARINC 717 interface to ARINC 429, 664, or MIL-STD-1553.

All the recorders are designed to be combined recorders, so that’s voice and data, datalink and image – we can sub-equip so that we provide just a voice or a data recorder. We can put two voice recorders, two data recorders in a smaller combined box onto a larger platform, saving equipment cost, installation time, logistics costs, etc. The Fortress recorder is implementing a 1Gb Ethernet interface so that any flight data that is recorded can be downloaded within 10 seconds so you’re transferring a quick access recorder type function into a flight recorder. So that gives it duel functionality.