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The Inventor Who Fought To Get Black Box Flight Recorders Into Every Plane (bbc.com) 74

Posted by EditorDavid from the before-the-black-box dept.
This week the BBC told the remarkable story of the man who invented the "black box" flight recorders -- and of all the resistance he enountered along the way.

dryriver shared this summary: In 1934, a passenger plane name Miss Hobart crashed into the sea off the coast of Australia. Among those killed was Anglican missionairy Rev Hubert Warren, whose last gift to his 8 year old son David had been a crystal radio set.

Young David Warren spent hours a day tinkering with the radio, eventually learning enough electronics engineering to build his own radios and sell them to other people. David Warren later grew to be a Rocket Scientist working for Australia's Aeronautical Research Laboratories. In 1953, the department loaned him to an expert panel trying to solve a costly and distressing mystery: why did the British de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner and the great hope of the new Jet Age, keep crashing? David Warren was confronted with a daunting problem -- how to determine from heavily deformed crashed plane fragments what had happened to the plane while it was in the air... Warren had an interesting idea -- what if every plane in the sky had a mini recorder in the cockpit...?

Warren's superior did not approve of the idea and told him to stick to chemicals and fuels.

When Warren got a new boss, the new boss was more sympathetic, but told him to do the R&D for it in complete secrecy. Since it wasn't a government-approved venture or a war-winning weapon, it couldn't be seen to take up lab time or money. "If I find you talking to anyone, including me, about this matter, I will have to sack you." When Warren first floated the idea of a cockpit recorder publicly, the pilots' union responded with fury, branding the recorder a snooping device, and insisted "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening."

Undeterred, Warren took to his garage and invented the first "Black Box" flight recorder.
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The Inventor Who Fought To Get Black Box Flight Recorders Into Every Plane More

The Inventor Who Fought To Get Black Box Flight Recorders Into Every Plane

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  • Spoiler for the article readers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aevan ( 903814 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @03:46AM (#58959346)
    Apparently the reason the Comet kept crashing was metal fatigue. Mild irk that the article never mentioned it, but I suppose 'at least it sparked interest'.

    • Re: Spoiler for the article readers (Score:5, Informative)

      by iserlohn ( 49556 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @05:41AM (#58959486) Homepage

      Specifically, metal fatigue stemming from the use of square windows as well as problems with rivetting.

      • How did that show up in the black box? Did they use rivet sensors?

        • Re: Spoiler for the article readers (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21, 2019 @08:57AM (#58959810)

          It didn't. The problem was found in a completely different way - an airframe was repeatedly filled with water and emptied. This simulated the way the plane overpressurized while flying - keeping ground level air pressure inside while the outside dropped to whatever it was at higher altitudes. Hundreds of cycles of this later one of the sides split open. I doubt a black box would have helped much, since the plane went from seemingly ok with no visible issues to an entire side missing very quickly. Kind of explains why the planes which went missing didn't have time to report issues either.

          • Re: Spoiler for the article readers (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Aristos Mazer ( 181252 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @10:02AM (#58959986)
            Black box might have helped ID metal fatigue and location of problem because pilots might have mentioned to each other or on radio the speed and location of the breakup. Comments like that have been helpful in past FAA investigations. Pilots are like general purpose sensors. Small things like âoethat sounds unusualâ can make a big difference.
          • A black box is not just to tell you what went wrong, sometimes know what didn't go wrong is just as important as it helps focus the search. So saying it wouldn't have helped isn't entirely true as it would have ruled out a whole raft of possibilities or something one of the pilots said in the final moments may have given key clues.

      • Re: Spoiler for the article readers (Score:5, Informative)

        by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @12:56PM (#58960630)
        Square and overly-large windows. Basically the stresses that would transmit through the window cutout get transferred to the adjoining metal. For square windows, the stresses for an entire edge of the window get transferred to the metal above and below the window. The transfer point is the corner, resulting in the corners experiencing extremely high stresses. Rivet holes can have the same effect (they act like really small windows) - if they're not perfectly round or are too close to the edge of the metal, the asymmetrical stress loading can cause premature fatigue failure.

        Also complicit was a material characteristic of aluminum - it has no fatigue limit [wikipedia.org]. Some materials like steel have a fatigue limit - if you design a structure so it's stronger than this limit, then it can withstand an infinite number of load cycles without failing (a load cycle is like bending a paper clip back and forth once). Aluminum has no fatigue limit, so no matter how strong you design it, it always weakens with every load cycle. This is why airframes are retired after approx 100,000 flights (pressurization cycles). The impossible-to-prevent-in-aluminum fatigue cracks have contaminated the airframe to such an extent that it's no longer considered safe to use. This is also why the Curiosity rover is developing holes in its wheels [planetary.org]. They made the wheels out of aluminum, and the thinness (to keep it light) means every time a wheel goes over a bump, that part of the wheel experience a rather large fatigue cycle. Eventually it results in fatigue failure of that part of the wheel.

        The cause of failure in the Comet was ultimately confirmed by submerging an entire Comet fuselage in a giant pool of water [youtube.com], then repeatedly pressurizing and depressurizing the cabin section to cause accelerated growth of fatigue cracks. While the Comet may have been the inspiration for the idea of black box flight recorders, they wouldn't have helped in this case. All they would've done is record the instantaneous destruction and break-up of the plane mid-flight.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Teun ( 17872 )
      I thought anyone with a mild interest in aviation knew about the Comet...

  • A tale of great management (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roskakori ( 447739 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @05:02AM (#58959452)

    Ok, I get it. David Warren rocks because he had the initial idea for the black box, built the prototype and seemed to a be generally nice person. TFA honors that, and rightfully so.

    What's lost quite a bit is the role of great management in this. First, he had an immediate manager who recognized and initially supported his idea, who is not even named. Then Laurie Coombes also supported it, was smart enough not to let it get killed early by some boards and provided the hidden funding to buy the German mini tape recorder. And when after going public Australia's civilian aviation authorities rejected the product, Coombees connected Warren with a British RAF hero who pitched the flight recorder in the UK, where it was welcomed with open arms.

    I wish management schools and books would give more time and space to people like that, and talk less about how to imitate supposed demigods like Jobs and Ford or loudmouths like Musk and Iacocca.

    • Amen, bro. Get the guy some modpoints.

    • Re:A tale of great management (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ZombieEngineer ( 738752 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @06:23AM (#58959560)

      Australia at the time (1950s) was a colonial outpost supplying raw materials to the factories of the UK (think wool for the textile mills of Manchester).

      It was 1969 when the UK joined the European Union which then resulted in Australia dropping down a few rungs as a preferred trading partner. It wasn't until the early 1980s that Australia started focusing on trade with Asia that it lost its last vestiges of European colonialism.

      For people in the US - trying thinking of the challenges an inventor in Puerto Rico would have.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I don't know... how much money did the black box thing make for ARL? Probably not as much as Jobs made for Apple.

      The problem with management isn't that they focus on the wrong case studies. It's their incentives. Every hierarchy known to man becomes less flexible with increased depth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ed1park ( 100777 )

      Agreed. Of course it's just a matter of time before they write a similar article about how cars didn't have black boxes...

  • Won't somebody think of the children?

  • there is something similar in cars & trucks no (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @06:39AM (#58959576)
    i heard it mentioned that there are black boxes in cars & trucks now that record driving habits of the driver
    • Your phone on your dashboard holder actually measures your habits more than any vehicle electronics do. The event data recorder in (many newer) cars has anywhere from 6 seconds to 6 minutes of data and records things like vehicle speed, throttle position, brake application, engine speed and velocity change through the collision, as well as steering angle and whether or not you were using your seat belt. It doesn't record audio or video (yet), or retain information over months.

      • Re:there is something similar in cars & trucks (Score:4, Informative)

        by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday July 21, 2019 @10:32AM (#58960096) Journal
        Cockpit voice recorders tend to store just the last 2 hours (not months) of up to 4 channels of audio (typically pilot, co-pilot,cockpit, and cabin), and flight data recorders tend to store 25 hours of about 80-some-odd parameters, typically sampled 5-20 times per second. Again, it's overwritten pretty darn quickly. I worked on FDRs and CVRs for a while, back just before the dot-bomb days, but I remember some things - like relatively "short" recording windows, and overwriting the data (solid state recorders were just coming out back then; it was 8 track tape, overwritten in a continual loop, before that - and etched foil even earlier).

  • Stop calling it a "black box" (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    (Groan) It's not a 'black box". I wish the media would stop dumbing it down.

    There are two parts: The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) to record what was said in the cockpit including other sounds that could be clues, and the flight data recorder (FDR) for recording speed, temperatures, G-loads, and positions of flight controls and flight surfaces. The two recorders are located in the rear of the aircraft.

    A "black box" is a container with unknown contents. The CVR and FDR are painted fluorescent orange for visib

  • The "best" inventions and ideas are not made by corporations to get rich. Neither are they made by large groups of engineers* gathered by governments. Good examples of this are jet engines, rockets, computers, electricity, the internal combustion engine and fire. All ideas can be taken and expanded on by groups but original innovation seems to happen best with individuals thinking for themselves.

    * Scientists do not generally invent "things". They provide pathways for engineers to work. There are of cour

  • I met David Warren (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21, 2019 @11:38AM (#58960370)

    I was lucky enough to stay with, and take, David Warren and his wife out for dinner in Melbourne (2008 I think) as his daughter was a friend. He told a longer version of the story with more details but basically the BBC's version is fairly accurate. He did say that it was not particularly the death of his father that encouraged him to develop the Black Box but simply that various aircraft crashes had been in the news before he came across the multi-track wire recorder at a trade show in Sydney. He thought his success was probably due to him being interested in all sorts of things and being able to make cross-connections and much to his credit he modestly said that he was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. I do remember that his driving to and from the pub where we had dinner was alarming; at the age of 83 he drove like a racing driver. It was an interesting evening!

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