For unfortunate reasons and circumstances, an airline's black box - the vital piece of technology that can often answer unanswered questions - has been in the news quite a bit this year. The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the shooting down of Malaysia Flight 17, the crash of a TransAsia plane in Taiwan … barely a news story went by that didn't make reference to the discovery, or need to discover, the black box.
So we thought we'd take a few moments to answer Five Things You Should Know About a Black Box.
1) IT'S NOT BLACK. Orange is the new black in this case. Or, officially, they are labeled "international orange" and are painted as such to make them easier to find among the wreckage of an air disaster.
2) IT'S ACTUALLY TWO PIECES OF EQUIPMENT. The Black Box conjures up an image of a square piece of metal, yet it is actually two separate pieces of equipment that goes by the slang black box. The pieces consist of the flight data recorder, which records airspeed, altitude, vertical acceleration and fuel flow; and the cockpit voice recorder, which, as its name implies, records not only conversations in the cockpit but sometimes the sounds the aircraft was making in the background to help determine cause of crash.
3) IT WAS INVENTED BY AN AUSTRALIAN. In the 1950s, Dr. David Warren wrote an article for the Aeronautical Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, entitled "A Device for Assisting Investigation into Aircraft Accidents." His initial prototype was called the "ARL Flight Memory Unit." Warren's impetus was both professional and personal - his father was killed in a plane crash in 1934.
4) YOU CAN'T DESTROY IT. The Black Box is virtually indestructible. It has been shot out of a cannon against a wall, placed in fires of over 2,000 degrees Farenheit, even dropped into a pressurized water tank. It's usually covered in titanium, hence its incredible resiliency.
5) THE FUTURE OF THE BLACK BOX. Currently, the cockpit voice recorder plays on a loop and records only the previous two hours of conversation and noise. That could change in this era of digital technology. Also a possibility? Video. The National Transportation Safety Board has discussed video of the cockpit, but pilots for now have resisted on the grounds of violation of privacy.
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