SLATE. All you wanted to know about: Black Box

The year 2014 will be recorded in the annals of history as one of the worst for the aviation industry, with multiple airplane crashes flagging the need for investments in airline safety. The crashes killed over 1,180 people, the most recent of which was the Air Asia crash two weeks ago.

Apart from the loss of life, the accidents also dealt a severe blow to the finances of the airlines in question. For instance, Malaysian Airlines, after the still-unexplained crash of its flight MH 370 in March, widened its losses instead of reporting a turnaround as analysts expected.

A critical piece of equipment which allows investigators and airlines to decipher the causes of such disasters is the plane’s so-called “black box”.

A black box is an electronic recording device placed in an aircraft solely for the purpose of facilitating the investigation of an accident. Consisting of a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, the box stores critical data from the plane’s diagnostic systems as well as conversations between the pilots. It serves as testimony of a flight’s history if the plane meets with an accident.

The term “flight recorder” is more precise and the term “black box” is only used informally and almost never within the flight safety or aviation industry. The recorders are not even black in colour, but usually bright orange, as they are intended to be spotted and recovered after accidents.

A black box does nothing to help a plane in the air, but it is a vital piece of a equipment in a crash as it helps investigators find out what happened just before the crash. Often, for example when a plane crashes into the sea, as happened with the 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182 by terrorists over the Atlantic Ocean, investigators have very little to go on — on this specific occasion the plane crashed before the pilot could even issue a mayday signal and much of the debris sank into the sea, leaving few clues. The discovery of the black box helped investigators unravel a Mexican plane crash that killed fourteen, including the interior minister of Mexico, on November 4, 2008. The black boxes for MH370 and the recent AirAsia flight are yet to be recovered.

Flight safety is obviously a serious issue and part of flight safety relates to the unpleasant task of deciphering what went wrong in an accident so that preventive steps can be taken. A black box is the most objective way to determine exactly what was going on in a flight that doesn’t make it back safely to the ground, especially when the passengers or crew are no longer be around to help piece together the causes for a crash.

But they’re not fool-proof and there’s an urgent need to upgrade the flight recorders of today, a fact which was driven home after the fruitless search for evidence to explain mysterious disappearance of the Malaysian MH370. Black boxes are usually fitted with underwater locator beacons which allow search teams to home in on them.

But they come with a limited battery life of 30 days. The MH370 search, which involved trawling some of the deepest sections in the Indian Ocean brought home the difficulty of locating the black box before the locator beacons stopped functioning.

Air crashes are black swan events and airlines are under constant pressure to cut costs. But the spate of recent accidents shows that it certainly doesn’t pay to cut corners on technology and safety equipment.

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