10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Black Box

The Survivor Story.

Plane crashes are horrific, the loss of innocent life from a routine travel experience can fill us with a terrible paranoia that we could also be victims. Whenever a plane crash occurs we always wants answers why it happened and how can we prevent it from happening again, so we turn to the black box. The black box has the reputation for being the one thing that always survives the crash but much of the public doesn’t know exactly how it works. In the 1950s commercial airlines experienced five crashes in their first two years of operation without explanations prompting investigators to find a way of learning what occurred in the final moments before the plane went down, thus the black box was born.

“The cockpit voice recorder stores the last two hours of sound from the cockpit and from the pilot’s headset microphones on four different channels.”

The black box is actually two flight recording devices located near the rear of the plane to reduce damage if an accident occurs. The box is capable of recording 88 types of data and is encased in titanium to keep the mechanism safe from damage. Although the casing is usually orange or red to make it noticeable during recovery many in the aviation industry are unsure how it came to be known as “the black box” though some believe it is due to the recovered boxes charred black upon its discovery.