Black Box: A Complete Guide

Black Box

#GS-03 Science and Technology

Officially called the Flight Data Recorder, the Black Box is an instrument which records all the activities in an aeroplane during its flight.
An aeroplane generally contains two black boxes which are kept at the front and backside of the aeroplane.
These record the information about a flight and help in reconstructing the events in case of an aircraft crash.

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR), as its name suggests records radio transmissions and conversations between the pilots, engine noises and other sounds in the cockpit.
The flight data recorder (FDR) records more than 80 types of information including altitude, airspeed, flight heading, vertical acceleration, pitch, roll, autopilot status, and others.

Black Box is made of Titanium which is then enclosed in a Titanium box.
This allows it to withstand any shock if it falls in the sea or falls from the height.
Though called Black boxes, they are a blazing, high-visibility orange in colour, so that crews looking for them at a crash site have a higher chance of finding them.
It has the ability to work for 30 days without any electricity and can withstand temperatures up to 11000°C.
To locate it in the aftermath of a plane crash at sea, each recorder is fitted with an Underwater Locator Beacon (ULB) which can be sensed from as deep as 14,000 feet.

They do not have the ability to prevent an aircraft crash nor can they help to protect the passengers in the event of a crash.
However, they become extremely important should the plane crash since they help crash investigators determine what happened just before the crash.
The aim of such an investigation is not to establish legal liability, but to identify the causes of a mishap in order to help prevent such incidents from happening in the future.

An Australian scientist named David Warren was the first person to build a FDR/CVR prototype in 1958.

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