<div>Let’s get one thing clear: The “black box” isn’t black. It’s orange. Before airlines made that colour standard for their flight recorders, some Boeings used a yellow sphere, and the British had a gizmo called the Red Egg. So why do they call it “black”? <br /><br /><div>One explanation goes this way: In 1939, an aviation engineer named Francois Hussenot devised a means of capturing an aircraft’s history to a box of photographic film. <br /><br /></div><div>Onboard sensors flashed into the box through calibrated mirrors and traced a running tab of flight parameters, including altitude, air speed and the position of the cockpit controls. <br /><br />Because the device worked like a camera, its insides had to be in total darkness; thus, perhaps, the “black”-ness of the box.<br /><br /></div><div>Away from prying hands<br /><br /></div><div>Hussenot is said to have thought his box so important that he buried a prototype in the sand dunes near the coast of Aquitaine in June 1940 to keep it out of German hands.<br /><br />After the war, technology for flight recorders became widespread. <br /></div><div><br />Some devices used photography; others scratched the data onto spools of metal foil. None recorded cockpit audio, however. <br /><br /></div><div>Then in 1953, an Australian chemist named David Warren was asked to help find the cause of recent jet-plane crashes. <br /><br />“I kept thinking to myself, if only we could recapture those last few seconds,” he told an interviewer in 1985, “it would save all this argument and uncertainty.” <br /><br /></div><div>Warren’s version of the device stored audio to a bobbin of magnetised steel wire. <br /></div><div> </div><div>In his telling, the name “black box” came from a British government official, who in 1958 referred to it using World War-II-era Air Force slang for subtle avionics.<br /><br /></div><div>By the mid-1960s, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders were mandatory for commercial airplanes. Photographic film and magnetic wire were replaced by other storage media, including solid-state memory (the kind used in flash drives). <br /><br /></div><div>Some have advocated that black boxes should beam their data up to satellites as a flight progresses. <br /></div><div><br />Black boxes must be painted orange or bright yellow, but they needn’t look like boxes.</div><div> </div><div>According to Federal Aviation Administration regulations, the device may come in a variety of shapes including spheres, cylinders and domes — so long as it’s not too small for investigators to find among the plane’s debris.<br /><br /></div><div>It should have a label on its side, with letters at least one inch high that spell out: “Flight Recorder — Do not open.”<br /><br /></div></div>
<div>Let’s get one thing clear: The “black box” isn’t black. It’s orange. Before airlines made that colour standard for their flight recorders, some Boeings used a yellow sphere, and the British had a gizmo called the Red Egg. So why do they call it “black”? <br /><br /><div>One explanation goes this way: In 1939, an aviation engineer named Francois Hussenot devised a means of capturing an aircraft’s history to a box of photographic film. <br /><br /></div><div>Onboard sensors flashed into the box through calibrated mirrors and traced a running tab of flight parameters, including altitude, air speed and the position of the cockpit controls. <br /><br />Because the device worked like a camera, its insides had to be in total darkness; thus, perhaps, the “black”-ness of the box.<br /><br /></div><div>Away from prying hands<br /><br /></div><div>Hussenot is said to have thought his box so important that he buried a prototype in the sand dunes near the coast of Aquitaine in June 1940 to keep it out of German hands.<br /><br />After the war, technology for flight recorders became widespread. <br /></div><div><br />Some devices used photography; others scratched the data onto spools of metal foil. None recorded cockpit audio, however. <br /><br /></div><div>Then in 1953, an Australian chemist named David Warren was asked to help find the cause of recent jet-plane crashes. <br /><br />“I kept thinking to myself, if only we could recapture those last few seconds,” he told an interviewer in 1985, “it would save all this argument and uncertainty.” <br /><br /></div><div>Warren’s version of the device stored audio to a bobbin of magnetised steel wire. <br /></div><div> </div><div>In his telling, the name “black box” came from a British government official, who in 1958 referred to it using World War-II-era Air Force slang for subtle avionics.<br /><br /></div><div>By the mid-1960s, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders were mandatory for commercial airplanes. Photographic film and magnetic wire were replaced by other storage media, including solid-state memory (the kind used in flash drives). <br /><br /></div><div>Some have advocated that black boxes should beam their data up to satellites as a flight progresses. <br /></div><div><br />Black boxes must be painted orange or bright yellow, but they needn’t look like boxes.</div><div> </div><div>According to Federal Aviation Administration regulations, the device may come in a variety of shapes including spheres, cylinders and domes — so long as it’s not too small for investigators to find among the plane’s debris.<br /><br /></div><div>It should have a label on its side, with letters at least one inch high that spell out: “Flight Recorder — Do not open.”<br /><br /></div></div>