Black Box is a vital electronic device also known as Flight Data Recorder that records 88 vital parameters about a flight including, airspeed, altitude, cockpit conversations, and air pressure among others.
The emphasis of the technical team from the IAF would be to find the Black Box a vital electronic device, also known as Flight Data Recorder. When a crash happens, the black box is located on a priority basis to understand what actually caused the crash. Here is how the process works.
What is a Black Box?
A Black Box is neither black in colour, nor box in shape, but is actually a compressor shaped device made in high-visibility orange colour. Experts disagree how the nickname originated, but many historians attribute their invention to Australian scientist David Warren in the 1950s. A Black Box is mandatory for all commercial airliner and armed forces to preserve clues from cockpit sounds and data to help prevent future accidents.
What’s inside a Black Box?
A typical Black Box weighs about 10 pounds (4.5 kilos) and contain four main parts:
– A chassis or interface designed to fix the device and facilitate recording and playback
– An underwater locator beacon
– The core housing or ‘Crash Survivable Memory Unit’ made of stainless steel or titanium
– Inside there, the precious finger-nail sized recording chips on circuit boards
There are two recorders: a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) for pilot voices or cockpit sounds and a Flight Data Recorder (FDR). The BEA released a photo of the FDR from the Ethiopian jet appearing to show that the chip’s crucial housing is intact while the replaceable chassis is crushed.
How is recording sourced?
Technicians peel away protective material and carefully clean connections to make sure they do not accidentally erase data. The audio or data file must be downloaded and copied. The data itself means nothing at first. It must be decoded from raw files before being turned into graphs. Investigators sometimes use “spectral analysis” – a way of examining sounds that allows the scientists to pick out barely audible alarms or the first fleeting crack of an explosion.
Modern day Black Box
While the older models used to record on wire, foil or reels of magnetic tape, modern versions use computer chips housed inside “crash-survivable” containers able to withstand g-forces 3,400 times the feeling of gravity. Since the crash and the unresolved disappearance in 2014 of Malaysian Airlines MH370, there has been intense debate about whether black boxes should stream live data back to the ground, which involves high cost and manpower.
