That's surprising that the black box overwrites itself after 2 hours of recording. This article linked to an article I missed about how the plane that had the door/panel fall off had the cockpit audio overwritten because it wasn't collected in time.
The black box isn't like a modern hard drive, with terabytes of storage. They're often old, and even the modern ones need to put so much effort into protection against things like fire, seawater and collisions that they don't have as much space as you might imagine.
They have to rely on someone going out of their way to take the box out, or shut down the plane, because the alternative would be for them to have some way to decide for themselves to stop recording. If they could do that then a false positive would cause them to miss potentially important data, so they're designed to keep going until someone makes it stop
There's a proposal by the FAA (here) to increase the length to 25h for new planes.
There have been catastrophic events that took longer than 2h by themselves to manifest, so they lost the beginning of the disaster by this stupidly short record duration.
I'm due to hop on to a 787 later this year. I don't really know how much of a risk I'm taking. This stuff's freaking me out. Are they all sus? Or just on certain airlines or what?
There are a lot of Boeing 787 in the air at any time. You can go to flightradar24.com, click the filter icon at the bottom, add new filter, then aircraft and as ICAO code you just enter B78* and it will show you only this aircraft type.
The risk for an incident with any 787 at any time in the next few years may be higher that it should be. But the risk for one individual plane on one single flight is absolutely negligible. You're more in danger on your way to the airport probably.
I can only see three incidents with 787 on wikipedia:
2013 Boeing 787 Dreamliner grounding
2024 TCAS incident over Somalia
LATAM Airlines Flight 800
This does not looks like a repeating pattern. The Flight 800 was a 300ft drop midair with around 30 to 40 people hitting the ceiling of the cabin and landing in Auckland without further problems. This does not sound 787 related. Just keep your seatbelts on.
The 2024 TCAS incident reads like a near collision based on miscommunication by air traffic control. Not related to the 787 series.
And well the 2013 787 grounding was based on lithium-ion batteries problems and has now been fixed (?).
I would say relax and keep your seatbelts buckled (disregarding what airframe you are on).
I won't attempt to assuage your concern with facts, as this is not my area of expertise, but numbers alone are in your favor. Millions to one, at least. "You don't worry about hitting the lottery," is what I try to tell myself. Let us know how it turns out. I wish you good fortune!
No, seriously. Not trying to one up you. It's for work. Otherwise, I would have picked a different flight because I'm paranoid even though I recognize they still have numerous flights daily without issue.
Do you ride in a car? You're way more likely to get injured in a car than a plane. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but these are incredibly rare occurrences. And luckily the airline regulators are super good about preventing previous issues from every happening again.
And I'm sure you won't be able to shut it out of your mind, but it's not worth worrying about for even a minute.