Great Aussie First: The ‘Black Box’ tells all!

An invention called the ‘Black Box’ made the world sit up when it was first developed. Not even Einstein could have imagined that a ‘Black Box’, holding the secrets of a plane disaster, would come to the fore.

Dr David Warren had suggested his theory to a meeting and was told, “You’re a chemist not an electronic whiz.” Nevertheless, he stuck with ‘black box’ and an aviation milestone was made.

When the Air France Concorde flight 4590 slammed into the ground, with flames shooting from two engines sixty seconds after its take-off from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport in August 2000, investigators could quickly reconstruct the plane’s final moments.
 

Main: Dr David Warren – he will go down in the history book.
 

This was miraculously made possible, as in hundreds of other plane crashes, by the recovery of the black-box flight memory recorder. 

The device, the first and only one of its kind, was developed by Dr David Warren when he was a young scientist at Melbourne’s Aeronautical Research Laboratories in 1954.

Dr Warren came up with the idea at the time he was involved in the mysterious crash of the world’s first commercial jet airliner, Comet 1, in 1954. There were no survivors or witnesses.
 

‘Black Box’ looks small but it can lead to the problem.
 

“The world realised that without knowing why the same thing could happen again and again,” Dr Warren recalled a few years ago.

Surprisingly, this prototype, which was then a red box, was rejected by the Australian aviation industry; it was eventually taken up by British and American companies and is now fitted to all commercial aircraft.

Compact and strongly-built the black-box, which is carried on the flight deck of an aircraft, “records cockpit voice communications on a continuously updated basis”.

The sheer indestructibly of the unit allows investigators to access the vital data in the event of a crash. Dr David Warren died in July, 2010.
 

David Warren’s ‘Black Box’ assesses what went wrong