What is a Black Box?

Black Box Latest News

After a Gatwick-bound Air India plane(AI171) crash, the search for the flight’s black box continues, which is crucial equipment to find out what happened moments before the disaster.

About Black Box

• It is a small machine that records information about an aircraft during its flight.
• This bright orange or yellow rectangular box is crafted to withstand explosions, fire, water pressure, and high-speed crashes.
• It was discovered by Australian scientist David Warren, it is used to discover the cause of a plane crash.
• Most aircraft are required to be equipped with two black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) — that record the information about a flight and help reconstruct the events leading to an aircraft accident.
  • The CVR records radio transmissions and other sounds in the cockpit, such as conversations between the pilots and engine noises.
  • The flight data recorder records more than 80 different types of information, such as altitude, airspeed, flight heading, vertical acceleration, pitch, roll, autopilot status, etc.
• The recording devices are stored inside a unit that is generally made out of strong substances such as steel or titanium and are also insulated from factors such as extreme heat, cold or wetness.
• To protect these black boxes, they are equipped towards the tail end of the aircraft, where the impact of a crash is usually the least.

Source: HT

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