Black Box

The tragedy of the air crash in the French Alps yesterday reminds all of us who have at one time or another flown in a commercial airliner that accidents can occur. Thankfully such events remain rare per passenger numbers but no less shocking for the statistics.

Aircraft safety has improved significantly since the early days of propellor planes and jet engines not just because of technological leaps forward but through a learning process largely attributed to essential data captured by the Black Box Flight Recorder.

Fatal accidents in particular involving the De Havilland Comet airliner in the 1950's served to diminish confidence in crash investigation. There were no survivors to offer evidence as to the final moments of a doomed flight and certainly no members of the flight deck crew as front line observers of what really happened.

Verdicts on crashes could only be based on the two main variables of human error or machine failure and did not really have any benefit in building in new systems and protocols by which a repetition of incidents could be avoided.

At around the time of the Comet disasters an Australian, David Warren, was attending a seminar in his role as a Fuel Scientist at the National Aeronautical Research Centre.

In between the interesting parts of lectures and briefings he passed the time by day dreaming about his recent purchase of  a tape recorder, quite a sophisticated piece of audio equipment for the time. He had visions of sneaking it into a concert by his favourite performer Tommy Dorsey and capturing the music live for his own entertainment.

One of the platform speakers at the seminar was commenting on the problems of diagnosing flight failures in the absence of any records of in flight information.

Warren, well known amongst his colleagues for lateral thinking, immediately started to consider how his prized acquisition could be applied to record the voices of pilots. On his return to work he circulated a memo to his superiors on the possibility of an aircraft flight recorder but this was dismissed and indeed Warren was criticised for devoting time to something that had nothing to do with his main job description.

His colleagues were however encouraging and helped to conceal his on-going research and development.

By 1957 a prototype was ready to be demonstrated but the Australian Aviation Authority remained uninterested. Their stance was that they did not need advice and such equipment had no immediate significance. It took a visitor from Britain to excite interest in Warren's idea and he was invited to make a presentation in London which was well received. On his way back to Australia lay-offs in Canada and the United States allowed  demonstrations which produced further interest.

It took a fatal crash in Queensland in 1960 for the Canberra Government to make flight recorders compulsory on all Australian passenger planes.

Amazingly, the equipment chosen was not home produced but an American version. It proved to be useless. An opportunity had been missed to market David Warren's invention also coming down to the fact that the military did not want to pay the $2000Aus to register the Patent even though it was for a far superior system.

In 1962 a further prototype was tested which was far more advanced than any of the competition in that it recorded not only all cockpit instruments but critically the screened and clear voices of the flight crew. Warren's version, nicknamed the "Red Egg" because of its distinctive shape by which intense impact, conflagration and pressure could be withstood. was the model for the Black Box..

In spite of frustration and constant thwarting by the authorities Warren persisted in his quest to produce what has become a vitally important tool by which to learn lessons and improve the safety of passenger flights for the millions who use that form of transport every day.