NTSB CHAIRMAN TO BE THE KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT RECORDER SYMPOSIUM

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Ellen G. Engleman will be the keynote speaker at a symposium on transportation vehicle recorders, June 4-5, 2003, in Arlington, VA.

The symposium will bring together a broad spectrum of manufacturers, operators, safety and regulatory officials, and other industry and government specialists to share the latest technical information and experiences in the use of vehicle recorders in all modes of transportation.

"The NTSB must continue to aggressively pursue safety, and I look forward to the discussions about potential new technologies," said NTSB Chairman Engleman.

Topics that will be explored during the two-day meeting include:

• State of the art of accident recorder technology
• Accident recorder survivability/crashworthiness requirements
• Video/image recorders current technology
• Data privacy issues
• Acquiring data during routine operations
• Proactive use of data in commercial operations

In addition, four transportation mode-specific workshops will be conducted on the afternoon of the second day. The workshops are:

• Aviation workshop 1st topic: Presentation and discussion on FedEx Express's experience on the installation of combi recorders and the re-certification of flight data recorder (FDR) systems
• Aviation workshop 2nd topic: Presentation and discussion on the adequacy of recorder data sources (filtering, sampling rates) and data processing errors
• Highway workshop: Panel discussion on event data recorders, focusing on user perspectives on parameters & data accessibility
• Marine workshop: Interactive workshop on practical aspects of safeguarding and retrieval of voyage data recorder (VDR) type data aboard vessels
• Rail workshop: Presentations and discussion on perspectives on rail event recorder maintenance programs and practices

The symposium, which will start at 8:30 AM each day, will be at the Hilton Alexandria Old Town, 1767 King Street, Alexandria, VA 85021. Tel: (703) 837-0440; Fax: (703) 837-0454. Further information on the symposium, including registration and hotel accommodations, is available on the NTSB web site at http://www.ntsb.gov and on the SAE web site at http://www.sae.org/recorder.

Media Contact: Keith Holloway, (202) 314-6100