Black Box

In News 

• Recently ,China’s aviation authority announced that a flight recorder, commonly known as “black box”, “from China Eastern MU5735 was found.

What are Black boxes?

• These are two large metallic boxes containing recorders that are required to be kept on most aircraft, one in the front and the other in the rear. 
• The recorders record the information about a flight, and help reconstruct the events leading to an aircraft accident.
  • The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) records radio transmissions and other sounds in the cockpit, such as conversations between the pilots, and engine noises.
  • The flight data recorder (FDR) records more than 80 different types of information such as altitude, airspeed, flight heading, vertical acceleration, pitch, roll, autopilot status, etc.
• Black boxes are mandatory on commercial flights. Their purpose on aircraft is not to establish legal liability, but to identify the causes of a mishap and, therefore, help to prevent adverse incidents in the future.
• Description :
  • Black boxes are a blazing, high-visibility orange in colour, so that crews looking for them at a crash site have the best chance of finding them. 
  • It is not certain how they got their nickname, but recorders are today the holy grail that investigators seek in their quest for answers whenever there is an airline accident.

• Invention
  • The use of black boxes dates back to the early 1950s, when, following plane crashes, investigators were unable to arrive at a conclusive cause for the accidents.
    •  An Australian scientist named David Warren is often credited with their invention.

• In the initial days of the black box, a limited amount of data was recorded on wire or foil. Thereafter magnetic tape was used, and modern models contain solid state memory chips.

• Retrieving the data
  • It usually takes 10-15 days to analyse the data recovered from the black boxes.
  • Meanwhile investigators look for other clues such as taking accounts from air traffic control personnel and recordings of the conversation between ATC and the pilots’ moments before the crash. 

Source:IE