Black box: Black box is an electronic device which is placed in an aircraft to record and store specific information from the aircraft that helps in the investigation process of any accidents and incidents.
Weight: 10 lbs
Size: Almost of a Shoe box
Costs: approx $18,000/-
Black box was invented by Dr. David Warren in 1953. He was an research scientist at the Aeronautical Research Lab (ARL).
Basically in aircraft we have two black boxes for two different purposes:
1) CVR - Cockpit Voice recorder
2) FDR - Flight data recorder
CVR is used to record the audio from the flight deck. CVR have a recorder with four microphones which records different kinds of audios from the cockpit. One microphone is attached to the radio panels, it records all the communication between the pilots and the ATC. Two microphones is connected to the intercom that records all the conversation between the pilots and the other one is connected to the overhead panel in the flight deck and records any surrounding sounds such as engine sounds, etc. CVR is capable enough to store the last 2 hours of recordings from all the four microphones.
CVR automatically starts recording the data from the second of starting at least one engine and ends few minutes after the shutting down of all the engines. It also have the manually "ON" button inside the cockpit and a shocking thing is in few aircraft models they also built an "erase" button where pilots can erase the recorded data with a single press. Yes, that true...
FDR is also known as ADR (Accident Data Recorder). According to the new FAA rule FDR should record and store the 25 hours of data of 88 aircraft parameters like airspeed, altitude, time, thrust of each engine, etc. A fact to know here is that, modern FDR's are capable enough to record around 1000 aircraft parameters which helps to reconstruct the aircraft crashes through computer graphics.
Now we have both audio from CVR and video from the FDR of the aircraft. Putting them together, we can actually generate a video of what happened with an aircraft. It makes easy for investigators to identify the cause of the accident.
Physical Attributes:
In Earlier times, flight recorders etched the data onto metal foil later that, magnetic tapes are used and now we are using solid state memory chips to record the data.
Black boxes are built in a way that, it can withstand an impact of more than 3,500 times of its very own weight and temperature up to 2,000 degree Fahrenheit for one hour. In order to achieve that, the interior of the black box is completely covered with aluminum housing which is surrounded by an inch thick of fireproof insulation and filled with soda bicarbonate that helps to absorb the heat. Finally the outside is made up with a quarter inch thick of stainless steel or Titanium.
To make it easy to identify a black box between the aircraft wreckage, it is completely painted with "International Orange" Color and to make it easy to detect a Black box under the water a additional device called "Underwater Locator Beacon" (ULB) is attached to it. It activates all by itself once it immersed into the water and starts releasing the ultrasonic 10 ms pulse signals once in every second at 37.5 kHz up to 30 days even while immersed to a depth of up to 20,000 feet.
Along with making it stronger as possible it is also important to correctly locate a black box on an aircraft to keep it safe. So that, it is located near to the aircraft tail. Because, this part of the aircraft is more likely to have the less impact during 80% of the crashes.
Conclusion:
In my way of conclusion, the main purpose of black box is to record the data and analyse it to understand the mistakes and errors that caused an accident and take steps to make sure that those mistakes not to happen again. Just like the black box, even we need to record, analyse and understand our own mistakes and make sure not to repeat them again.
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