What’s in an Airplane’s Black Box That Can Be a Clue to an Accident?

JAKARTA – What’s inside black box an airplane which is a sophisticated electronic device capable of recording all activities during a flight.

Balck boxes are two boxes that must be present in every airplane. These two are the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR).

Both boxes store flight information and help in the reconstruction of various events that occurred on the plane, including plane crashes.

Even though it is called Black Box, it doesn’t mean that the two boxes are black. Instead the two boxes are orange. The need for a Black Box was deemed urgent in the 1950s, the relevant transportation authorities and investigators had difficulty finding the cause of the plane crash.

That’s where the idea emerged to install a recording device into the plane. Initially all information that happened on the plane was recorded on a metal strip. However, they changed to magnetic drives because they were considered to store more information.

Over time, as information needed to be continuously recorded, magnetic drives were also replaced with super-powerful memory chips.

The question is why is the Black Box really needed for plane crash investigations? As mentioned at the beginning, two Black Box boxes, namely the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR), record all information about the flight and help reconstruct the events that led to the plane crash.

Apart from that, the CVR also records radio transmissions and other sounds in the cockpit such as conversations between pilots, engine sounds. While working the FDR also records more than 80 types of information such as altitude, air speed, flight direction, vertical acceleration, pitch, roll, autopilot status and others.

Then why was the Blak Box not damaged when the plane crashed? The black box is known to be stored in a container made of steel or titanium. It is also isolated from extreme heat, cold and wet.