Following an aircraft accident or incident, investigation entities such as BEA (Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety) and BEA-é (Bureau of State aviation accident investigations) will systematically analyze flight recorders, commonly called black boxes.
Black boxes are designed to protect flight parameters and cockpit audio recordings in the event of an air accident. The analysis of audio data from cockpit voice recorders (CVR) is absolutely essential in the process of understanding why an accident occured. The duration of CVR recordings has recently moved from 2 hours to 25 hours of audio. The transcription work is particularly time-consuming and greatly affect the workload of investigators trying to establish the circumstances of the accident in order to prevent a similar accident. In this joint effort to evolve their methods and rely on automatic audio data mining algorithms, the BEA and RESEDA have already started to integrate tools, notably automatic speech transcription, with the aim of quickly indexing the content of the recordings and more effectively identify the phases of interest for analysis.
