Airplanes are the safest mode of travel, a hundred times safer than cars. Since its invention, Aeroplanes have taken over ships as the preferred mode of international travel. It, also, is the fastest mode of travel.
Once in a while, due to some technical malfunction or some other reason, we hear news about plane crashes. It is followed by several investigations and reveals the cause of the crash. But, how is it that we find the cause of a crash even when there are no survivors? It is with the help of an orange-colored box called Black Box.
What is a Black Box?
A black box is an almost indestructible device that records data of a particular flight based on hundreds of parameters. It also records the conversations in the cockpit from four microphones.
When the Black Box was first introduced, sometime after WWII, it had two devices that would record the data and the audio. It utilized magnetic tapes at first, but now we use solid-state memory devices to record data on these crucial devices.
A Black Box has a memory unit that lies inside a crash survivable unit, a power supply, a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), a Flash memory, and an underwater locator beam.
Features and workings of a Black Box
Black Boxes must withstand a plane crash without getting damaged themselves. So, they need to pass several quality tests before getting installed in a plane. Some of them include an impact with a concrete wall at 750 km/hr, exposure to 1100 Celsius temperature for an hour. They also need to withstand water pressure found at 6,000 meters deep in the oceans.
A Dry-silica coating of 1 inch provides thermal protection. Aluminum surrounds the stack of memory cards in thin layers. Stainless steel or Titanium is used to create a shell to create a shield outside the insulation material. To further protect the black box, it is situated in the back of the plane.
If a black box is lost in the sea it sends out a signal on contact with salty water. The signal is ultrasonic that can be detected within two kilometers of the black box.
Black Box records all the conversations in the cockpit, computer announcements, announcements to the passengers/crew, and radio traffic. To prevent overloading of the memory, the voice recordings of a black box are overwritten every two hours or 120 minutes.
Once a black box is retrieved, it is taken to an agency that can retrieve data from a black box, only a few agencies worldwide can do so. Black Box is painted bright orange so that it can be identified easily after a crash.
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