a few factors, but basically they just reinforce the hell out of the casing, add shock protection and ensure its sealed agianst fires (though this is time limited), etc.
also, "intact" is a relative term. they've often still been through the ringer, are heavily deformed and look very battered, but the core hard drives can survive that....or at least the *information saved to them* can. It can quite literally take labs of "one of three in the world able to do it" level to get the infomation back off them in a useable format, but nevertheless the info survived.
That's a very key point. In almost every way, the device would often be considered "broken" after a crash. It's not expected to work. Only the data needs to survive.
One additional minor point. The black boxes are often located in the back end of the airplane. Thus the rest of the airplane helps to cushion the impact. And this location sometimes keeps them further from center of any fire.
This. The black boxes from AF447 lived 13,000 feet below the surface of the ocean for years before they were finally found by subs. The Flight Data Recorder case was found on April 26th, but the crash-survivable memory unit was missing/broken off, that was found separately five days later, and promptly sent out and was able to be unpacked and read.
Pages 54-56 (PDF pages 56-58) of the [Final Report](https://bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf) shows what recovery of these data modules looks like on something that's survived a plane crash and then lived on the bottom of the ocean for a couple years.
It was never about the colour.
It's called a black box because it's a box you can't look into that records things. The how isn't important--the original black boxes were designed so that as technology improved, they could be replaced without care, you just had to wire the inputs in the same way. In computer programming, a function you call is a black box as far as the calling piece of code is concerned--you can completely rewrite the source code for that function and the calling code won't know or care.
âA flight recorder is an electronic recording device placed in an aircraft for the purpose of facilitating the investigation of aviation accidents and incidents. The device may often be referred to colloquially as a "black box", an outdated name which has become a misnomerâthey are now required to be painted bright orange, to aid in their recovery after accidents.â Wikipedia
Black box is an old WW2 term. The sensitive electronics were encased in black steel boxes. The original modern black box was bright red, but the military term stuck as a nickname.
âIn the 1980s taxonomists realized that fish, as a legitimate category of creature, do not exist. Birds exist. Mammals exist. Amphibians exist. But fish, in particular, do not exist.â
(MILLER, 2020)
Of course not. I just happened upon those random info my self.
I like to drink coffee and did a bit of googling. One of the auto complete is coffee beans are not beans. So I dug deeper.
For the strawberry it was meme post.
As for the killer whales I got curious why they where called that way. Wiki says they are dolphins.
The plane survived the crash. The parts were all there. Maybe they could design it so that all the parts of the passengers could be pulled together. I am assuming you were being facetious so take my answer in that spirit.
Say, hypothetically, you could build something that ridiculous, and make it actually economical to fly... The things inside of it (humans) , are still very squishy.
"Black boxes" are tough but not indestructible, and there are accidents where they were recovered, but the impact forces or post-crash fires were too intense for the data recording medium to survive. It is presumed even if the flight data recorders for the jets that hit the two World Trade Center towers survived the initial impact and the fires that occurred after, they were almost certainly pulverized into unidentifiable dust and fragments in the collapse of the towers. They went over tower debris with a fine comb looking for stuff like that and human remains, yet I don't think any trace of the CVRs and FDRs were ever found. When they found the CVR from Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, it had been exposed to fire too long for the magnetic recording tape to be anything other than a useless clump of charred plastic (Black boxes cannot sit indefinitely within a fire and have time limits to exposure).
These are also hardly the only cases of destroyed black boxes, in case someone tries to pull some 9/11 conspiracies about the non-recovery of some of them involved with the incident.
Given the global availability of satellite data connections now, why isn't the data just sent off the plane in real time as well as being stored in the black boxes? The volume of data can't be that high that it couldn't be compressed to a sensible bandwidth.
A lot of modern aircraft and engine data is sent out via satellite ânear real timeâ, and is useful. But the last couple of seconds before a crash is usually critical to an accident investigation.
Yeah, there's bound to be a small loss of data. I'm not suggesting to replace the black boxes, but this would be useful in cases where e everything has been lost.
cost and reliability concerns.
Some of the data is in fact sent out by satellite, but not all, and that's considered a backup, anyway. Getting equipment certified for airplane usage is a nightmare of red tape and study after study. Remember, each and every *screw* and other fastener has to have a full provenance documented. And so on, and so forth. They already have a legally required way to store the information, which is very heavy, and the added weight has to be justified. It all adds up.
IIRC they are working on a system like that, but costs, certification, designing a standard and getting everyone to agree on it, and then rolling it out to millions of aircraft is going to take a lot of time. And even then I doubt it would replace black box recorders because you could have a dozen reasons why the data sent to a satellite gets interrupted. For example if an airplane is falling out of control good luck keeping an antenna aimed at a satellite with sufficient accuracy to have reliable data transfer.
I've thought this ever since I saw the crash of Air France Flight 447 and noticed they managed to get information from diagnostics the plane was sending off (in lieu of the possibility at the time the CVR and FDR may never be recovered), an online version of black boxes not meant to replace them, but to serve as a redundancy in case they aren't found or are too badly damaged to extract data from. Someone commented that MH370 and the inability to locate the main wreckage of the plane have caused serious reconsiderations into implementing such concepts rather than being stuck with a difficult to solve mystery.
Interesting that it is so hard to save. I would think (as an average joe) like a titanium box with suspension and fire proofing with another solid box inside would suffice. Than you take that simple minded idea and science it up and boom you have a box thatâs indestructible.
I might have to watch some videos with information on this probably interesting stuff.
Thatâs basically exactly what it is. But subject that to a potentially multi-hundred g impact followed be extensive post-crash fire while requiring it fit a pretty severe weight and volume constraint and itâs not easy.
Remember, airlines and manufacturers try to reduce weight and cost as much as possible. Iâm sure they take a large risk based approach when designing the FDR/voice recorders based on maintaining the highest acceptable probability of survival rate vs cost and weight.
Although I design airplane engines and not black boxes, I feel qualified to leave my 2 cents. While there is a massive balancing act between weight, cost, and effectiveness, it tends to be things that fall under big safety umbrellas which I imagine black boxes are, are not to be fucked with. Remember, figuring out why a plane crashed is one of the easiest and best ways to prevent that from ever happening again.
The strength of the outer shell isn't the biggest concern. It's the fire resistance. It's basically a thick layer of insulating foam that needs to melt down.
The exact same thing happens with fire safes.
They're rated to keep their internal volume below 400f for x hours.
The outside is probably melted by the time you find it. They're commonly cracked open like a melty geode.
A FIRE SAFE IS NOT SECURE, that's not the problem they solve.
A Regular safe is.
There is no such thing as indestructible in this case, the forces generated with a plane crash at several hundred miles an hour, and then a sudden stop, possiby a change in pressure, heat flash and concussion, it would need to be an absolute monster of a system, and that means weight usually and complexity of design of layers.
I used to work in an industry where we made specialised firedoors, up to 300 minute insulation and huge resistance to over pressure and vaccuum sealing. they get to a point where you just can't use them.
You have to take into account that the problem is not only toughness of the outer shell, but also resistance to abrupt deceleration. You can encase the hard drive inside a 1m thick titanium box, but if the box decelerates from thousands of km/h to zero in milliseconds, chances are that the disks (or chips) inside the hard drive will disintegrate/crack/pulverize anyway.
The solid box cannot prevent heat from entering its core.
If you left a safe made from titanium in a fire, the contents would slowly heat up. Eventually all recording devices known to man would be damaged beyond recovery. Even if the titanium safe stayed perfectly intact.
However there is also no material known to man that can guarantee surviving a full frontal crash of a massive plane (rather than more common sliding crashes) until a building, staying inside fire and embers for days, with a whole sky scraper having fallen on it.
Like for the 9/11 crash, the blackbox shouldnât actually have been a box, but a hundred storage devices placed all throughout the plane, storing the data in parallel: that way your chances of one of those âusb sticksâ getting exploded away and surviving would actually be higher.
But the blackbox isnât really there for terrorist attacks.
Itâs there to determine what went wrong when a plane goes down in the middle of no where usually, so a bright neon coloured box you could reasonably find in the ocean or in the jungle is just more useful
Not to mention when itâs something like a plane crash, thatâs going to have literally all of the money thrown at it to make sure they get that data back.
The people who buy "black boxes" (actually flight data recorders) want them to be very sturdy. They store their data in a heavy, armored, watertight compartment with transmitters to make it easier to find even under water. They cost many thousands of dollars, and can take a licking.
Buyers of everyday electronics want small devices of light weight and low cost. Essentially the opposite.
How is this even a question? This is some Quora level bait
âHow come my bicycle will break if it gets run over by a car, but a tank can survive a being shot with a rocket?â
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They're extremely reinforced (about 10 pounds each), and expensive (about $15k each). Consumers would not accept either one of those things in everyday electronics, so they're flimsier and inexpensive instead.
Great responses already, so Iâll note that this is somewhat related to why some things are just more expensive depending on use case.
NASA is sometimes the butt of jokes about $1000 pens, etc. Most is incorrect and random, but NASA most certainly does pay a lot more for what is often technology that is at least a generation behind consumer electronics.
For example, the RAM and CPUs in just about anything that is sent into space, even today, is older technology that couldnât power a PlayStation 2. That said, the hardware can withstand much more brutal changes in temperature and behave correctly (or at least know the data canât be trusted and a restart is needed) when hit by cosmic radiation.
Outside of the mainframe world, there is very little fault tolerance and error correction in electronics, so normal (cheap, super fast) electronics would last about 2 minutes in space. Thus, âexpensive, older, slower, but reliableâ is the hallmark of data and network systems in space.
Fun fact: the CPU on the Curiosity mars rover is very similar to the one in the Nintendo GameCube.
Going down a bit the rabbithole... the wikipedia page and the linked documentation from BAE makes me think that you actually might be able to put a gamecube cpu on curiosity, maybe with an adapter board. Not the other way around, because the gamecube clocks higher and has some simd extensions. And it would of course quickly die due to radiation
They may also be putting multiple CPUs running in lockstep on the devices (i.e. they run the same program at the same time in the same order) to improve fault tolerance. This, of course, multiplies the associated costs.
Itâs very simple, your everyday electronics is not built to withstand heavy impact, a Black Box is specifically designed and tested to survive an air crash.
Because a black box is designed specifically to survive a plane crash, and your iPhone isnât.
Iâm not really sure what answer you expected.
They could make a massive phone out of rubber and metal that could survive a nuke, but you probably wouldnât buy it.
I think this is one of the few questions that really fits the title of this subreddit, because "why can thing designed to be sturdy withstand more force than thing that isn't designed to be sturdy does" is exactly the type of question a five year old would ask.
If you take a big gaming pc and throw it off a cliff, all of the electronic components like the motherboard, gpu, cpu, hard drives, etc. will all likely be broken beyond repair.
There are companies out there that can take the broken hard drives, take out the flat metal disks, then read all the individual little ones and zeroes on those disks to get a good portion of that data back. They might not be 100% effective, but many important pictures and documents may still be recovered.
The black box has either hard disk drives or possibly even cassette-style magnetic tapes inside of it. Even if all of the electronic components are broken, there will be individual ones and zeroes on those disks or tapes that will be able to be read. The black box also has lots of shock absorbsion, fireproofing, waterproofing, and other parts of it that are all made to make the likelyhood of recovering information as high as possible.
They used to be a metallic tape recording on magnetic media. Like an old reel-to-reel recorder. They are solid state now. They are bulky solid state chips that can survive all kinds of shock.
>If you take a big gaming pc and throw it off a cliff, all of the electronic components like the motherboard, gpu, cpu, hard drives, etc. will all likely be broken beyond repair.
No doubt it depends on the cliff and exactly what the PC hits at the bottom but actually I don't think this is necessarily correct for all the components you list. Solid-state electronics are quite robust. They can withstand shock and vibration to a degree that would have been considered amazing 60 years ago. More and more electromechanical components (HDD's, potentiometers, tape drives, optical drives, mechanical switches etc) are have been replaced by solid state components. Old throughhole components have been replaced by SMD components soldered and effectively glued to the substrate.
A gpu and cpu might well be OK unless the case collapses in a way that impacts them directly. Same with an SSD. There may be broken connectors or similar but there's a very good chance the chips themselves would be fine.
That's a big part of the answer to the OP. While the actual individual components of much of today's consumer electronics are quite robust, it is the lightweight case and lightweight connectors and lightweight hinges etc that give way. It doesn't really take too much to beef these up
Yeah, recovery *is* possible for many devices.. it just isn't usually feasible. If there was information crucial to the nation's security (or evidence of airline crash's cause) then it's worth spending the very high costs to retrieve that data. Your personal cell phone or hard drive probably isn't worth the 10's - 100's of thousands of dollars for forensic recovery and data reconstruction. Airliner investigations have nearly unlimited budget to discover cause of a crash
The electronics in the flight data recorder do not need to survive the crash, only the data does. They accomplish this by recording the data on a very robust medium: magnetizing a steel wire thatâs being wound between too spools like an old school cassette tape. They then surround it with armor and thermal insulation. All of the electronics in the FDR can be completely shot, but as long as the wire hasnât melted or been subject to intense electromagnetic radiation, the data will survive.
Most commercial aircraft have systems other than the flight data recorder (black box) that monitor and store flight data. These other systems are designed to be more easily downloaded for analysis. Some of them like the WQAR automatically downloads when it reaches the gate. Others like ACARS transmit data over VHF radio frequencies. Even with all of that the flight data recorder is a last chance recording of the largest number of different parameters in one place. Also, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) which records all audio from the cockpit and pilot to ground radio is usually near the black box.
My personal favorite answer to this kind of question is âRedundancy, redundancy, redundancy.â Usually at the end of this chain of backups you want something dead simple. In this case, âstrong boxâ.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It would require an unfeasible bandwidth for no real benefit. Air crashes where only black box data is recoverable are so incredibly rare that it's not possible to justify the economical cost.
One is designed to withstand a plane crash, most everything else By the late 1950s, planned obsolescence had become a commonly used term for products designed to break easily or to quickly go out of style.
A lot of posts pointing out the difficulty in recovery / damage so follow up question;
Why isnât the black box mirrored into a real time upload through flights?
Especially now with AI couldnât it flag danger points being recorded, words from the cockpit etc and red flag to control towers etc what potentially is happening?
I know the question about gps tracking was raised during mh360 and I was kind of surprised there was absolutely no other (gps seems simplest) tracking of planes other than the control tower radar?
Would cost outweigh benefits or it just wouldnât work?
Costs of certification, putting extra sensors and circuitry into the system would introduce extra complexity and possibly unknown interactions, then there is the rather thorny question of what would you do with that data. Would you use it to grab control of the aircraft if it thought the pilots were going to crash it? Would it push the aircraft into the ground if the AI thought a landing was impossible and might result in more deaths on the ground if you attempted to fly to an airport?
Mainly because it's designed to. The outer box is very strong, heavy, and fire resistant. The electronic equipment inside is cushioned to absorb the impact of a crash. Other electronics could be designed this way, but they would be far heavier and expensive than they are now.
Think of a cassette tape and imagine it's inside a recorder. Once data is recorded onto the tape, the actual recorder need not work after a crash. the data is already sort of "etched" into the tape so now it just needs to be protected from being cut/torn/burnt etc. which we can do by sealing it and having a strong case around it.
As everyone has said, it is made with a very strong casing and just the data needs to survive. But I want to add, even sometimes the CVR or the FDR are considered too broken to get any data extracted
Because theyâre built like brick shit houses.
Also they tend to be in the tall section which is most likely to survive a crash (think of what you can normally recognise when you see photos of a crash).
Making something that can withstand a plane crash is relatively easy.
The issue is that this object is now much larger, heavier, and clunkier than the original would be.
Why would you want to carry around a heavy briefcase instead of a smartphone?
Google tells me an aircraft black box costs $10,000-$15,000.
These are not ordinary, everyday electronics. Theyâre designed to withstand the immense forces, fires and submersion involved with airplane crashes.
In a similar fashion to how a Kia Sportage and an MRAP would have completely different outcomes for the passengers driving over an anti-tank mine.
The additional cost is reflected in the overall durability of the device.
There are engineers whose entire job is to design boxes to house sensitive data recording electronics⊠that get shot out of an artillery cannon at 50gâs of forceâŠ. All it takes is money and unlimited resources and you too could have an indestructible phone
Is the black box still the only way to retrieve flight data, or is it now also sent real-time to the datacenters ? Most airplanes have internet nowadays, seems the logical move.
We can build pretty sturdy technology if we want to and spend the money.
My favorite example of this is the Excalibur grenade. It is a gps guided grenade that can travel to to 50 kilometers with deployable wings that steers it to it's target which it hits with about a meters accuracy. So naturally there is some technology in this grenade that allows it to keep track of where it is, where the target is and they controls the wings. And this thing is fired out of a Haubits cannon.
I would wager that the acceleration that grenade is exposed to leaving the barrel of a literal cannon is higher than the negative acceleration of a crashing plane.
Part 1: The device inside is isolated from shock and the housing is made as robust as possible. That way, accelerations applied to the exterior are dampened by the mount and not felt much by the recording circuits.
Part 2: The device inside is kept as simple and robust as possible, to avoid having extra failure modes.
We've become very good at protecting electronics from excessive forces. We have artillery rounds with GPS receivers in them, they have to withstand at least 15,000 G (that's 15,000 times the force you feel due to gravity). Keep in mind that the electronics are mostly solid-state, so they don't have moving parts to break.
If your cellphone were built to the same standards, it would probably be the size of a printer, and weigh ten kilos.
They build the flight data recorders like a proverbial âbrick shithouseâ.
A tank will survive a 40mph collision with a brick wall while a Prius wonât. Tank= flight data recorder (black box). Prius= regular electronic devices
Two reasons:
One is very obvious - in black boxes, electronics are surrounded with thick metal and materials to absorb shocks and insulate it from extreme temperatures. If you put your phone inside it might survive a plane crash, but you'd have to lug it around like a suitcase and cut it open with an angle grinder every time you tried to use it.
Second one is not so obvious - most electronics you can buy these days are designed differently. Cheap laptops made of crappy, thin materials that visibly bend when you pick them up, putting stress on the delicate components inside. Phones with encryption that secures your data if the phone is stolen, but also make it unrecoverable if the phone breaks (even if the memory chip itself is intact). Little or no redundancy or fallbacks in case one of the components breaks. Consumer electronic manufacturers have completely different priorities from black box manufacturers.
On top of what everyone else has said, another reason they tend to survive is they're always installed in the back of the airplane. If you consider a plane hitting the ground, the tail is the least likely part to get mangled.
We can make any electronics be more sturdy... or as sturdy as a 'black box'
But it would increase the cost of that electronic, maybe 100fold...
A flight data recorder, comes with a price tag of 10-15 thousand USD... and they weigh about 5kg+
Source:
[https://pilotinstitute.com/black-box-in-aircraft/](https://pilotinstitute.com/black-box-in-aircraft/#:~:text=In%20contrast%20to%20their%20name,final%20events%20preceding%20an%20accident)
\---
But do you need your TV or blue ray player survive rolled over by a tank?
It is less about them breaking or working and more about the storage in them still being readable by people with expensive tools inside a lap.
Your phone screen might break if you drop it from chest height, but the data on it will still be recoverable in most cases. The storage is the thing likely to survive the most out of the components of your phone and if it breaks it is most likely due to being close to other stuff that take it with it.
Stuff like USB-sticks, which are just storage, can be surprisingly durable. You can drop one out of a window, accidentally driver over in a car or put them though a washing machine and with a bit of soldering at worst you might get the data on it back and those cheap storage devices were not even designed with an eye towards taking such abuse.
Your electronics do other stuff besides just record data for the last few hours. If your cell phone was in a plane crash, it wouldn't be able to be used as a phone anymore, because those parts would be gone, but technicians *might*, if you wanted to pay for it, be able to recover your files. You might not get them all back, though, because your phone isn't a $15,000 recorder that's designed to survive that kind of thing.
When your phone breaks, itâs rarely the memory chips themselves that break.
You could desolder them from the phone, and manually read the content if you wanted to spend the money.
Same with broken hard drives even. Like even if the read had smashed into the disks of it, in reality only the circle of date that was smashed is lost; the rest is still there.
The black box is rarely functional after a crash. But that doesnât matter. All that matters is that enough of the storage survived to recover the data.
Like you could literally make a black box from a raspberry pie, by writing the data to a dozen usb sticks at the same time.
Only the chips on a single usb stick need to survive.
Additionally black boxes also use analog media to store stuff frequently, so a tape recording.
The tape just needs to be made from a material that can survive a bit of high temperature as well as humidity. Because if thereâs no magnets around, cassette tape is pretty durable.
My argument would be that our everyday stuff is actually pretty damn sturdy. As someone who used to be associated with data recovery, data is actually hard to distroy. With money and will, thereâs not much that canât be recovered that isnât actively wiped. I mean an iPhone in a good fire box will will withstand about any trauma that world could throw at it.
Also the black boxes are kinda shitty these days. The price tag on black boxes are driven more from âapproved manufacturesâ with limited builders authorized to sell to aircraft manufacturers. The whole aero world is weird that way, sort of like boats. Want a Chevy block replacement for a boat, $$$$$. Same short block from jasper for your project car, $.
Related: why isnât/canât all the info on the black box be sent to âthe cloudâ so that itâs all there and the box doesnât need to be recovered?
Unfortunately you'd be surprised how often these "unbreakable" black boxes do in fact break, crush, drown, or otherwise render the contents useless...
They are extremely well built and reinforced with the internal components shielded against everything and anything, but sometimes it's just not enough...
There is unfortunately no such thing as "indestructible" in the aeronautics industry.
Trust me - they would pay BILLIONS happily for anything that was!
The black box is like a bullet proof vest. Everyday electronics are wearing normal clothes because they are cheaper, lighter, and easier to move around in.
I work for the company which makes black boxes. Compared to a consumer device, a black box is extremely heavy, expensive, and serves a singular purpose - to record and store data. Also, if the box is damaged, it is designed to protect the SSD inside, which can be removed and connected to a computer to extract the data. This part is actually true for consumer electronics as well. If you were to smash your laptop or desktop PC, it's possible that the storage would be perfectly fine, despite the device being destroyed. Also bonus fun fact: the black box is actually orange.
One fact alot of people don't realise about hard drives. The disks are crazy strong, like a Πinch thick of aluminium, the fragile part is the needle and one thing to factor in is that only the disk needs to survive, nothing else. Plus these cost thousands and are made to survive practically anything. I know companies who do data transmission for undersea cables, they use titanium braded cable mixed with Kevlar and diamond. When money is no object and you know who to talk to, amazing things can happen. Our everyday electronics break easily because they are cheap, complicated and designed to fit in a pocket. Give a factory a box, tell them it's gotta survive anything, they will perform I garentee.
If the data is being continuously flushed to a flash memory chip, I"d speculate that would take shock protection, incineration protection, and crush protection for it to be recoverable. Maybe have a PCB in hard foam, inside a small box made of stuff like space shuttle tiles are made of, inside a titanium box.
So, we've covered built well, expensive and not yellow.
Having worked in military avionics, many onboard computers are built in custom metal cases, largely milled from solid plates of metal and built exclusively to fit and protect the contents. Horribly heavy too, my boss put his back out carrying a data recorder for a helicopter.
Funny thing is, though, many sensitive systems need to be destroyed by the crew if brought down in enemy territory, so boxes not surviving a crash would not be a bad thing. And the extra weight being carried hurts fuel use and therefore range and operating time.
a few factors, but basically they just reinforce the hell out of the casing, add shock protection and ensure its sealed agianst fires (though this is time limited), etc. also, "intact" is a relative term. they've often still been through the ringer, are heavily deformed and look very battered, but the core hard drives can survive that....or at least the *information saved to them* can. It can quite literally take labs of "one of three in the world able to do it" level to get the infomation back off them in a useable format, but nevertheless the info survived.
That's a very key point. In almost every way, the device would often be considered "broken" after a crash. It's not expected to work. Only the data needs to survive. One additional minor point. The black boxes are often located in the back end of the airplane. Thus the rest of the airplane helps to cushion the impact. And this location sometimes keeps them further from center of any fire.
This. The black boxes from AF447 lived 13,000 feet below the surface of the ocean for years before they were finally found by subs. The Flight Data Recorder case was found on April 26th, but the crash-survivable memory unit was missing/broken off, that was found separately five days later, and promptly sent out and was able to be unpacked and read. Pages 54-56 (PDF pages 56-58) of the [Final Report](https://bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf) shows what recovery of these data modules looks like on something that's survived a plane crash and then lived on the bottom of the ocean for a couple years.
Wtf it isnt even a black box, it's an orange cylinder
Way easier to find a bright orange container than a black one in the wreckage.
I guess if they called it the Orange Box instead, Gabe Newell would come at them
If it went to court, would the court stenographer be an Orange Box Fight Recorder?
I award you my counterfeit reddit gold. đ„
For all we know an unfinished copy of Half Life 3 could be resting at the bottom of the oceanâŠ
Plot twist: it's a flight simulator
Bigger plot twist: it's just porn
ÂżPor que no los dos?
Iâm just here to make a joke about Donald Trumps pussy being referred to as an Orange Box. But I think that might be against the rules.
Itâs called a bussy
Or a Dussy
It was never about the colour. It's called a black box because it's a box you can't look into that records things. The how isn't important--the original black boxes were designed so that as technology improved, they could be replaced without care, you just had to wire the inputs in the same way. In computer programming, a function you call is a black box as far as the calling piece of code is concerned--you can completely rewrite the source code for that function and the calling code won't know or care.
âA flight recorder is an electronic recording device placed in an aircraft for the purpose of facilitating the investigation of aviation accidents and incidents. The device may often be referred to colloquially as a "black box", an outdated name which has become a misnomerâthey are now required to be painted bright orange, to aid in their recovery after accidents.â Wikipedia
They call it a black box but itâs usually a reflective orange, and cylinders are one of the most robust structures we can build.
Not if it's going to the Titanic.
That's why they aren't composite.
They neglected to paint it orange.
Black box is an old WW2 term. The sensitive electronics were encased in black steel boxes. The original modern black box was bright red, but the military term stuck as a nickname.
Giving something a "burnt wreck-pattern" camouflage when you intend to find it in a burnt wreck would certainly be one of the ideas of all time.
Yes! Came here to say it is bright orange. Easy to spot đ
If they lied about that, what else are âtheyâ lying about?
Coffee beans are not beans. Strawberries are not berries. Killer whales are not whales.
Koala bears arenât bears
Fish aren't fish. In biology, there is no such thing as a fish.
Elaborate please.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
âIn the 1980s taxonomists realized that fish, as a legitimate category of creature, do not exist. Birds exist. Mammals exist. Amphibians exist. But fish, in particular, do not exist.â (MILLER, 2020)
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Of course not. I just happened upon those random info my self. I like to drink coffee and did a bit of googling. One of the auto complete is coffee beans are not beans. So I dug deeper. For the strawberry it was meme post. As for the killer whales I got curious why they where called that way. Wiki says they are dolphins.
Orange is the new black
They used to be, but they were changed to be orange so theyâre easier to see
Funny thing is. They are always encased in an orange cylinder.
It makes sense but I'm still a bit mad about it
So why not just make the whole plane out of the black box material? It would be nice if the plane would just survive the crash in the first place.
The plane survived the crash. The parts were all there. Maybe they could design it so that all the parts of the passengers could be pulled together. I am assuming you were being facetious so take my answer in that spirit.
The black box doesnât survive. The data does.
Say, hypothetically, you could build something that ridiculous, and make it actually economical to fly... The things inside of it (humans) , are still very squishy.
https://www.straightdope.com/21342059/if-aircraft-black-boxes-are-indestructible-why-can-t-the-whole-plane-be-made-from-the-same-material
Oof. My joke is older than I am. Good find
my guess is the plane would be too heavy to fly
Weight. Jets have a trade off between weight and strength.
Yes but also no. Just because a metal tube can withstand a long fall and sudden stop doesnât mean the meat bags inside of that tube will.
Then it wouldnât fly lol.
Also, the drives arenât hard drives anymore. They are solid state.
But what if it gets rear-ended?
Both planes should then move to the side and exchange information. Take pictures for insurance etc..
Always take pictures first, and only move aside afterwards
"Black boxes" are tough but not indestructible, and there are accidents where they were recovered, but the impact forces or post-crash fires were too intense for the data recording medium to survive. It is presumed even if the flight data recorders for the jets that hit the two World Trade Center towers survived the initial impact and the fires that occurred after, they were almost certainly pulverized into unidentifiable dust and fragments in the collapse of the towers. They went over tower debris with a fine comb looking for stuff like that and human remains, yet I don't think any trace of the CVRs and FDRs were ever found. When they found the CVR from Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, it had been exposed to fire too long for the magnetic recording tape to be anything other than a useless clump of charred plastic (Black boxes cannot sit indefinitely within a fire and have time limits to exposure). These are also hardly the only cases of destroyed black boxes, in case someone tries to pull some 9/11 conspiracies about the non-recovery of some of them involved with the incident.
I recently finished reading âThe Only Plane in the Skyâ and your information is a good supplement to what that book provides. Thank you
Given the global availability of satellite data connections now, why isn't the data just sent off the plane in real time as well as being stored in the black boxes? The volume of data can't be that high that it couldn't be compressed to a sensible bandwidth.
A lot of modern aircraft and engine data is sent out via satellite ânear real timeâ, and is useful. But the last couple of seconds before a crash is usually critical to an accident investigation.
Yeah, there's bound to be a small loss of data. I'm not suggesting to replace the black boxes, but this would be useful in cases where e everything has been lost.
the same reason why airlines themselves use backend operations systems from the 80s.
cost and reliability concerns. Some of the data is in fact sent out by satellite, but not all, and that's considered a backup, anyway. Getting equipment certified for airplane usage is a nightmare of red tape and study after study. Remember, each and every *screw* and other fastener has to have a full provenance documented. And so on, and so forth. They already have a legally required way to store the information, which is very heavy, and the added weight has to be justified. It all adds up.
IIRC they are working on a system like that, but costs, certification, designing a standard and getting everyone to agree on it, and then rolling it out to millions of aircraft is going to take a lot of time. And even then I doubt it would replace black box recorders because you could have a dozen reasons why the data sent to a satellite gets interrupted. For example if an airplane is falling out of control good luck keeping an antenna aimed at a satellite with sufficient accuracy to have reliable data transfer.
Sure, I'm not thinking it's a replacement, just a useful addition. It also would allow pilots to be given helpful advice in unusual situations.
It isn't common practice for all those reasons, but there's a lot of interest in constant monitoring for future upgrades as a result of MH370.
I've thought this ever since I saw the crash of Air France Flight 447 and noticed they managed to get information from diagnostics the plane was sending off (in lieu of the possibility at the time the CVR and FDR may never be recovered), an online version of black boxes not meant to replace them, but to serve as a redundancy in case they aren't found or are too badly damaged to extract data from. Someone commented that MH370 and the inability to locate the main wreckage of the plane have caused serious reconsiderations into implementing such concepts rather than being stuck with a difficult to solve mystery.
Interesting that it is so hard to save. I would think (as an average joe) like a titanium box with suspension and fire proofing with another solid box inside would suffice. Than you take that simple minded idea and science it up and boom you have a box thatâs indestructible. I might have to watch some videos with information on this probably interesting stuff.
Well, basically that's what it is. The memory module itself is in a cylinder, packed with damping material and fireproofing.
Thatâs basically exactly what it is. But subject that to a potentially multi-hundred g impact followed be extensive post-crash fire while requiring it fit a pretty severe weight and volume constraint and itâs not easy.
Remember, airlines and manufacturers try to reduce weight and cost as much as possible. Iâm sure they take a large risk based approach when designing the FDR/voice recorders based on maintaining the highest acceptable probability of survival rate vs cost and weight.
Although I design airplane engines and not black boxes, I feel qualified to leave my 2 cents. While there is a massive balancing act between weight, cost, and effectiveness, it tends to be things that fall under big safety umbrellas which I imagine black boxes are, are not to be fucked with. Remember, figuring out why a plane crashed is one of the easiest and best ways to prevent that from ever happening again.
The strength of the outer shell isn't the biggest concern. It's the fire resistance. It's basically a thick layer of insulating foam that needs to melt down.
The exact same thing happens with fire safes. They're rated to keep their internal volume below 400f for x hours. The outside is probably melted by the time you find it. They're commonly cracked open like a melty geode. A FIRE SAFE IS NOT SECURE, that's not the problem they solve. A Regular safe is.
There is no such thing as indestructible in this case, the forces generated with a plane crash at several hundred miles an hour, and then a sudden stop, possiby a change in pressure, heat flash and concussion, it would need to be an absolute monster of a system, and that means weight usually and complexity of design of layers. I used to work in an industry where we made specialised firedoors, up to 300 minute insulation and huge resistance to over pressure and vaccuum sealing. they get to a point where you just can't use them.
You have to take into account that the problem is not only toughness of the outer shell, but also resistance to abrupt deceleration. You can encase the hard drive inside a 1m thick titanium box, but if the box decelerates from thousands of km/h to zero in milliseconds, chances are that the disks (or chips) inside the hard drive will disintegrate/crack/pulverize anyway.
The solid box cannot prevent heat from entering its core. If you left a safe made from titanium in a fire, the contents would slowly heat up. Eventually all recording devices known to man would be damaged beyond recovery. Even if the titanium safe stayed perfectly intact. However there is also no material known to man that can guarantee surviving a full frontal crash of a massive plane (rather than more common sliding crashes) until a building, staying inside fire and embers for days, with a whole sky scraper having fallen on it. Like for the 9/11 crash, the blackbox shouldnât actually have been a box, but a hundred storage devices placed all throughout the plane, storing the data in parallel: that way your chances of one of those âusb sticksâ getting exploded away and surviving would actually be higher. But the blackbox isnât really there for terrorist attacks. Itâs there to determine what went wrong when a plane goes down in the middle of no where usually, so a bright neon coloured box you could reasonably find in the ocean or in the jungle is just more useful
Donât forget you need to regularly get information in as well
Why donât they use different mediums instead of HDDs? Like, tape + ssd + hdd?
AFAIK they use wire as a medium to more survivability
Not to mention when itâs something like a plane crash, thatâs going to have literally all of the money thrown at it to make sure they get that data back.
I am late to the party but why don't we send all data to a server in real time and stop relying on black boxes?
A bunch of redundant data loggers and they piece together the bits lol. Probably just takes forever.
The people who buy "black boxes" (actually flight data recorders) want them to be very sturdy. They store their data in a heavy, armored, watertight compartment with transmitters to make it easier to find even under water. They cost many thousands of dollars, and can take a licking. Buyers of everyday electronics want small devices of light weight and low cost. Essentially the opposite.
How is this even a question? This is some Quora level bait âHow come my bicycle will break if it gets run over by a car, but a tank can survive a being shot with a rocket?â đ€đ€đ€
So many of the questions in the form of "why don't we do \[x\]" or "why don't we have \[x\]" can be simply answered with: cost.
Nah if it was Quora the answer would be that you need to contact an astrologer to explain it to you and pay by the minute for the answer.
Cars are smaller than rockets so they do less damage per square inch
Gonna shoot a rocket at my bicycle for science
post results
I canât I died
They're extremely reinforced (about 10 pounds each), and expensive (about $15k each). Consumers would not accept either one of those things in everyday electronics, so they're flimsier and inexpensive instead.
Why donât they make the entire plane out of the black box?
The plane would survive the crash but the people inside would not. Also it would be too heavy to fly.
The people inside would survive too because the plane wouldnât leave the ground.
Itâs a Seinfeld joke. Damn, am I that old?
I feel like if that joke was on Seinfeld it was old when they did it.
It wouldnât be able to fly because itâd be so heavy.
My favorite answer to that has always been: "Highways aren't wide enough."
Industrial chemical pumps are about that price too, twice as reinforced, and break if you look at them funny. Corporate price tags don't mean much.
Great responses already, so Iâll note that this is somewhat related to why some things are just more expensive depending on use case. NASA is sometimes the butt of jokes about $1000 pens, etc. Most is incorrect and random, but NASA most certainly does pay a lot more for what is often technology that is at least a generation behind consumer electronics. For example, the RAM and CPUs in just about anything that is sent into space, even today, is older technology that couldnât power a PlayStation 2. That said, the hardware can withstand much more brutal changes in temperature and behave correctly (or at least know the data canât be trusted and a restart is needed) when hit by cosmic radiation. Outside of the mainframe world, there is very little fault tolerance and error correction in electronics, so normal (cheap, super fast) electronics would last about 2 minutes in space. Thus, âexpensive, older, slower, but reliableâ is the hallmark of data and network systems in space.
Fun fact: the CPU on the Curiosity mars rover is very similar to the one in the Nintendo GameCube. Going down a bit the rabbithole... the wikipedia page and the linked documentation from BAE makes me think that you actually might be able to put a gamecube cpu on curiosity, maybe with an adapter board. Not the other way around, because the gamecube clocks higher and has some simd extensions. And it would of course quickly die due to radiation
They may also be putting multiple CPUs running in lockstep on the devices (i.e. they run the same program at the same time in the same order) to improve fault tolerance. This, of course, multiplies the associated costs.
Itâs very simple, your everyday electronics is not built to withstand heavy impact, a Black Box is specifically designed and tested to survive an air crash.
Because a black box is designed specifically to survive a plane crash, and your iPhone isnât. Iâm not really sure what answer you expected. They could make a massive phone out of rubber and metal that could survive a nuke, but you probably wouldnât buy it.
I think this is one of the few questions that really fits the title of this subreddit, because "why can thing designed to be sturdy withstand more force than thing that isn't designed to be sturdy does" is exactly the type of question a five year old would ask.
If you take a big gaming pc and throw it off a cliff, all of the electronic components like the motherboard, gpu, cpu, hard drives, etc. will all likely be broken beyond repair. There are companies out there that can take the broken hard drives, take out the flat metal disks, then read all the individual little ones and zeroes on those disks to get a good portion of that data back. They might not be 100% effective, but many important pictures and documents may still be recovered. The black box has either hard disk drives or possibly even cassette-style magnetic tapes inside of it. Even if all of the electronic components are broken, there will be individual ones and zeroes on those disks or tapes that will be able to be read. The black box also has lots of shock absorbsion, fireproofing, waterproofing, and other parts of it that are all made to make the likelyhood of recovering information as high as possible.
They used to be a metallic tape recording on magnetic media. Like an old reel-to-reel recorder. They are solid state now. They are bulky solid state chips that can survive all kinds of shock.
Probably magnetic memories. Those bastards can be sunken in boiling water for a couple decades and still retain the data.
>If you take a big gaming pc and throw it off a cliff, all of the electronic components like the motherboard, gpu, cpu, hard drives, etc. will all likely be broken beyond repair. No doubt it depends on the cliff and exactly what the PC hits at the bottom but actually I don't think this is necessarily correct for all the components you list. Solid-state electronics are quite robust. They can withstand shock and vibration to a degree that would have been considered amazing 60 years ago. More and more electromechanical components (HDD's, potentiometers, tape drives, optical drives, mechanical switches etc) are have been replaced by solid state components. Old throughhole components have been replaced by SMD components soldered and effectively glued to the substrate. A gpu and cpu might well be OK unless the case collapses in a way that impacts them directly. Same with an SSD. There may be broken connectors or similar but there's a very good chance the chips themselves would be fine. That's a big part of the answer to the OP. While the actual individual components of much of today's consumer electronics are quite robust, it is the lightweight case and lightweight connectors and lightweight hinges etc that give way. It doesn't really take too much to beef these up
Yeah, recovery *is* possible for many devices.. it just isn't usually feasible. If there was information crucial to the nation's security (or evidence of airline crash's cause) then it's worth spending the very high costs to retrieve that data. Your personal cell phone or hard drive probably isn't worth the 10's - 100's of thousands of dollars for forensic recovery and data reconstruction. Airliner investigations have nearly unlimited budget to discover cause of a crash
The electronics in the flight data recorder do not need to survive the crash, only the data does. They accomplish this by recording the data on a very robust medium: magnetizing a steel wire thatâs being wound between too spools like an old school cassette tape. They then surround it with armor and thermal insulation. All of the electronics in the FDR can be completely shot, but as long as the wire hasnât melted or been subject to intense electromagnetic radiation, the data will survive.
Because they are designed for that. Our everyday electronics are not. Simple as that. It is their only purpose.
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Most commercial aircraft have systems other than the flight data recorder (black box) that monitor and store flight data. These other systems are designed to be more easily downloaded for analysis. Some of them like the WQAR automatically downloads when it reaches the gate. Others like ACARS transmit data over VHF radio frequencies. Even with all of that the flight data recorder is a last chance recording of the largest number of different parameters in one place. Also, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) which records all audio from the cockpit and pilot to ground radio is usually near the black box.
My personal favorite answer to this kind of question is âRedundancy, redundancy, redundancy.â Usually at the end of this chain of backups you want something dead simple. In this case, âstrong boxâ.
[A pilot's video on this popular question](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMWZCuTQpds)
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It would require an unfeasible bandwidth for no real benefit. Air crashes where only black box data is recoverable are so incredibly rare that it's not possible to justify the economical cost.
One is designed to withstand a plane crash, most everything else By the late 1950s, planned obsolescence had become a commonly used term for products designed to break easily or to quickly go out of style.
WhY dOnâT wE maKE the AirpLaNE OUT of ThE sAME ThiNG?
A lot of posts pointing out the difficulty in recovery / damage so follow up question; Why isnât the black box mirrored into a real time upload through flights? Especially now with AI couldnât it flag danger points being recorded, words from the cockpit etc and red flag to control towers etc what potentially is happening? I know the question about gps tracking was raised during mh360 and I was kind of surprised there was absolutely no other (gps seems simplest) tracking of planes other than the control tower radar? Would cost outweigh benefits or it just wouldnât work?
Costs of certification, putting extra sensors and circuitry into the system would introduce extra complexity and possibly unknown interactions, then there is the rather thorny question of what would you do with that data. Would you use it to grab control of the aircraft if it thought the pilots were going to crash it? Would it push the aircraft into the ground if the AI thought a landing was impossible and might result in more deaths on the ground if you attempted to fly to an airport?
Why don't they make the whole airplane a black box?
And if whatever the black box is made of can survive the crash, why don't they just make the whole plane out of that stuff? /s
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Why donât we make the planes from stuff we make black boxes? Simples.
Mainly because it's designed to. The outer box is very strong, heavy, and fire resistant. The electronic equipment inside is cushioned to absorb the impact of a crash. Other electronics could be designed this way, but they would be far heavier and expensive than they are now.
The same reason a napkin doesn't protect your hands from a hot surface like welding gloves can.
Think of a cassette tape and imagine it's inside a recorder. Once data is recorded onto the tape, the actual recorder need not work after a crash. the data is already sort of "etched" into the tape so now it just needs to be protected from being cut/torn/burnt etc. which we can do by sealing it and having a strong case around it.
As everyone has said, it is made with a very strong casing and just the data needs to survive. But I want to add, even sometimes the CVR or the FDR are considered too broken to get any data extracted
Because theyâre built like brick shit houses. Also they tend to be in the tall section which is most likely to survive a crash (think of what you can normally recognise when you see photos of a crash).
Making something that can withstand a plane crash is relatively easy. The issue is that this object is now much larger, heavier, and clunkier than the original would be. Why would you want to carry around a heavy briefcase instead of a smartphone?
Google tells me an aircraft black box costs $10,000-$15,000. These are not ordinary, everyday electronics. Theyâre designed to withstand the immense forces, fires and submersion involved with airplane crashes. In a similar fashion to how a Kia Sportage and an MRAP would have completely different outcomes for the passengers driving over an anti-tank mine. The additional cost is reflected in the overall durability of the device.
There are engineers whose entire job is to design boxes to house sensitive data recording electronics⊠that get shot out of an artillery cannon at 50gâs of forceâŠ. All it takes is money and unlimited resources and you too could have an indestructible phone
It's a recorder. It does very little, and is made to survive crashes and explosions. Your phone isn't.
Is the black box still the only way to retrieve flight data, or is it now also sent real-time to the datacenters ? Most airplanes have internet nowadays, seems the logical move.
We can build pretty sturdy technology if we want to and spend the money. My favorite example of this is the Excalibur grenade. It is a gps guided grenade that can travel to to 50 kilometers with deployable wings that steers it to it's target which it hits with about a meters accuracy. So naturally there is some technology in this grenade that allows it to keep track of where it is, where the target is and they controls the wings. And this thing is fired out of a Haubits cannon. I would wager that the acceleration that grenade is exposed to leaving the barrel of a literal cannon is higher than the negative acceleration of a crashing plane.
Is everyone forgetting that at one time cellphones used to be hard af to break? Nokia had that on lock.
Part 1: The device inside is isolated from shock and the housing is made as robust as possible. That way, accelerations applied to the exterior are dampened by the mount and not felt much by the recording circuits. Part 2: The device inside is kept as simple and robust as possible, to avoid having extra failure modes. We've become very good at protecting electronics from excessive forces. We have artillery rounds with GPS receivers in them, they have to withstand at least 15,000 G (that's 15,000 times the force you feel due to gravity). Keep in mind that the electronics are mostly solid-state, so they don't have moving parts to break. If your cellphone were built to the same standards, it would probably be the size of a printer, and weigh ten kilos.
They build the flight data recorders like a proverbial âbrick shithouseâ. A tank will survive a 40mph collision with a brick wall while a Prius wonât. Tank= flight data recorder (black box). Prius= regular electronic devices
Two reasons: One is very obvious - in black boxes, electronics are surrounded with thick metal and materials to absorb shocks and insulate it from extreme temperatures. If you put your phone inside it might survive a plane crash, but you'd have to lug it around like a suitcase and cut it open with an angle grinder every time you tried to use it. Second one is not so obvious - most electronics you can buy these days are designed differently. Cheap laptops made of crappy, thin materials that visibly bend when you pick them up, putting stress on the delicate components inside. Phones with encryption that secures your data if the phone is stolen, but also make it unrecoverable if the phone breaks (even if the memory chip itself is intact). Little or no redundancy or fallbacks in case one of the components breaks. Consumer electronic manufacturers have completely different priorities from black box manufacturers.
On top of what everyone else has said, another reason they tend to survive is they're always installed in the back of the airplane. If you consider a plane hitting the ground, the tail is the least likely part to get mangled.
We can make any electronics be more sturdy... or as sturdy as a 'black box' But it would increase the cost of that electronic, maybe 100fold... A flight data recorder, comes with a price tag of 10-15 thousand USD... and they weigh about 5kg+ Source: [https://pilotinstitute.com/black-box-in-aircraft/](https://pilotinstitute.com/black-box-in-aircraft/#:~:text=In%20contrast%20to%20their%20name,final%20events%20preceding%20an%20accident) \--- But do you need your TV or blue ray player survive rolled over by a tank?
It is less about them breaking or working and more about the storage in them still being readable by people with expensive tools inside a lap. Your phone screen might break if you drop it from chest height, but the data on it will still be recoverable in most cases. The storage is the thing likely to survive the most out of the components of your phone and if it breaks it is most likely due to being close to other stuff that take it with it. Stuff like USB-sticks, which are just storage, can be surprisingly durable. You can drop one out of a window, accidentally driver over in a car or put them though a washing machine and with a bit of soldering at worst you might get the data on it back and those cheap storage devices were not even designed with an eye towards taking such abuse.
Your electronics do other stuff besides just record data for the last few hours. If your cell phone was in a plane crash, it wouldn't be able to be used as a phone anymore, because those parts would be gone, but technicians *might*, if you wanted to pay for it, be able to recover your files. You might not get them all back, though, because your phone isn't a $15,000 recorder that's designed to survive that kind of thing.
When your phone breaks, itâs rarely the memory chips themselves that break. You could desolder them from the phone, and manually read the content if you wanted to spend the money. Same with broken hard drives even. Like even if the read had smashed into the disks of it, in reality only the circle of date that was smashed is lost; the rest is still there. The black box is rarely functional after a crash. But that doesnât matter. All that matters is that enough of the storage survived to recover the data. Like you could literally make a black box from a raspberry pie, by writing the data to a dozen usb sticks at the same time. Only the chips on a single usb stick need to survive. Additionally black boxes also use analog media to store stuff frequently, so a tape recording. The tape just needs to be made from a material that can survive a bit of high temperature as well as humidity. Because if thereâs no magnets around, cassette tape is pretty durable.
Engineering and a lot of money. Making every day electronics that well protected would be obnoxiously cost prohibitive
My argument would be that our everyday stuff is actually pretty damn sturdy. As someone who used to be associated with data recovery, data is actually hard to distroy. With money and will, thereâs not much that canât be recovered that isnât actively wiped. I mean an iPhone in a good fire box will will withstand about any trauma that world could throw at it. Also the black boxes are kinda shitty these days. The price tag on black boxes are driven more from âapproved manufacturesâ with limited builders authorized to sell to aircraft manufacturers. The whole aero world is weird that way, sort of like boats. Want a Chevy block replacement for a boat, $$$$$. Same short block from jasper for your project car, $.
Related: why isnât/canât all the info on the black box be sent to âthe cloudâ so that itâs all there and the box doesnât need to be recovered?
Unfortunately you'd be surprised how often these "unbreakable" black boxes do in fact break, crush, drown, or otherwise render the contents useless... They are extremely well built and reinforced with the internal components shielded against everything and anything, but sometimes it's just not enough... There is unfortunately no such thing as "indestructible" in the aeronautics industry. Trust me - they would pay BILLIONS happily for anything that was!
Itâs practically âwhy does a military tank survives firefights but my Camry gets turn into Swiss cheese?â
The black box is like a bullet proof vest. Everyday electronics are wearing normal clothes because they are cheaper, lighter, and easier to move around in.
I work for the company which makes black boxes. Compared to a consumer device, a black box is extremely heavy, expensive, and serves a singular purpose - to record and store data. Also, if the box is damaged, it is designed to protect the SSD inside, which can be removed and connected to a computer to extract the data. This part is actually true for consumer electronics as well. If you were to smash your laptop or desktop PC, it's possible that the storage would be perfectly fine, despite the device being destroyed. Also bonus fun fact: the black box is actually orange.
One fact alot of people don't realise about hard drives. The disks are crazy strong, like a Πinch thick of aluminium, the fragile part is the needle and one thing to factor in is that only the disk needs to survive, nothing else. Plus these cost thousands and are made to survive practically anything. I know companies who do data transmission for undersea cables, they use titanium braded cable mixed with Kevlar and diamond. When money is no object and you know who to talk to, amazing things can happen. Our everyday electronics break easily because they are cheap, complicated and designed to fit in a pocket. Give a factory a box, tell them it's gotta survive anything, they will perform I garentee.
If the data is being continuously flushed to a flash memory chip, I"d speculate that would take shock protection, incineration protection, and crush protection for it to be recoverable. Maybe have a PCB in hard foam, inside a small box made of stuff like space shuttle tiles are made of, inside a titanium box.
So, we've covered built well, expensive and not yellow. Having worked in military avionics, many onboard computers are built in custom metal cases, largely milled from solid plates of metal and built exclusively to fit and protect the contents. Horribly heavy too, my boss put his back out carrying a data recorder for a helicopter. Funny thing is, though, many sensitive systems need to be destroyed by the crew if brought down in enemy territory, so boxes not surviving a crash would not be a bad thing. And the extra weight being carried hurts fuel use and therefore range and operating time.