Black box - Live witness

In the 50s of the last century, after a series of mysterious plane crash, an Australian researcher invented a black box. This flight recording device is intended to make the aviation industry safer.

The black box was born

Engineer David Warren (Australia's aviation research agency), at the age of nine, was orphaned in a first plane crash in Australia. From small Warren passionate about technology, is a high school student who has assembled a radio. He remembers a fairly compact tape recorder produced by Germany and exhibited at a fair. He thought there should be a similar tape recorder in the cockpit to record conversations, important data relating to the aircraft while protecting the device safety when the plane crashed. Mr. Warren presented the committee with his idea but was rejected. He announced the initiative in the press but did not receive a reply.

In 1957 Warren accepted his pocket money to build the device and named it "Memory Flight Unit". The structure of this device is quite simple but rigorous and smart: a thin steel wire as usual in modern audio equipment was magnetized by an electric control head. With this device it is possible to record pilots' conversations and record 8 flight data per second. Every 4 hours, this tape started again from the beginning and placed in a box with great impact resistance.

What engineer Warren didn't know was that the Wright brothers in their first motorized flights at the time also installed a fairly simple device to record flight data such as flight speed, number of turns propellers . However, this recording device is not installed in a safe box to prevent aircraft from falling because their flights are only a few feet from the ground.

A black box was found after the plane crash.

In 1959 the flight recording device of two French experts Francois Hussenot and Paul Beaudouin was performed: using an 8m film mounted in a sealed black box. When the plane works, these negatives will be revealed with a mirror. Movies shoot fast or slow depending on the altitude and speed of the aircraft. Flight recorder named Black Box (black box). This device has some disadvantages: the film can only be used once, after each use, it must be replaced and cannot record exchanges, so it only installs Hussenograph during test flights.

Warren's steel wire recording device does not have these weaknesses, but is unnoticed because there were almost no plane crashes at that time, the agency said. "Less direct value for civil aviation".

When the civil aviation officer who visited Australia heard about Mr. Warren's device, he invited the inventor to bring the recorder with him to London. BBC television is particularly impressed with the device, so it was immediately introduced on British television and radio.

At that time, American engineer James Ryan was also preparing to ship his recording device. However, this device has the weakness of not recording conversations. According to experts, the biggest advantage of Warren's recording device is that it can record every sound in the cockpit.

An important device

Currently, modern recorder on the aircraft can store over one thousand data. The noise in the cockpit sometimes brought a turning point, surprising in the process of investigating the cause of the accident.

An example is the TWA 800 flight, which exploded in July 1996 in the eastern sky of New York. Less than a second before crashing the machine recorded two very small sounds with a frequency of 400 Hertz related to the supply of electrical energy in the aircraft. It was the short-circuiting sound of a fuel tank's fuel meter leading to an accident.

Sometimes the record of the recording device also reflects the desperation and panic of the pilots in the cockpit, such as: the 1996 crash with the Birgenair Boeing 757 of Turkey near the Plus coast. Dominican Republic killed 189 tourists. At that time, a cylinder is blocked so that the autopilot and the pilot get the exact speed parameter. Only a short time, the chief driver panicked and told the co-pilot "need to push, push, push, push. What should I do now?". When referring to the chief throttle valve frantically said, "Don't close, please don't close." Although technically corrupt, the Commission investigated through what was recorded in the cockpit saying that the mistake Pilots are the main cause of this accident.