The Context:
An Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner (VT-ANB) carrying 242 passengers crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport on 12th June 2025.
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- The aircraft reportedly failed to climb beyond 600 feet before crashing into the Meghani Nagar area of Ahmedabad.
- Rescue operations are ongoing; the exact cause remains unknown, pending analysis of the black box and wreckage.
Explanation:
What is a black box?
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- A black box is simply a flight recorder, with origins in the early 1950s. According to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), Australian jet-fuel expert Dr. David Ronald de Mey Warren was recruited to a special team in 1953 to analyse the mid-air explosions being experienced by the world’s first commercial jet aircraft, the de Havilland Comet. It was launched for commercial operations in 1952, but saw major accidents in its initial years.
- For example, on May 2, 1953, BOAC Flight 783 departed Kolkata for Delhi, amidst severe rain and thunderstorms, with 43 passengers and crew members. “Six minutes after takeoff, while climbing to 7,500 feet, the plane experienced an in-flight break-up and crashed, killing all on board,” the US Federal Aviation Administration website says.
- In 1963, following two fatal aviation disasters, Australia became the first country to make flight recorders a mandatory legal requirement, the magazine noted. In the initial days of the black box, the information was recorded onto a metal strip, which was then upgraded to magnetic drives, succeeded by solid-state memory chips.
Why is it called a ‘black’ box?
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- The Airbus website notes that even before Warren, French engineer François Hussenot began working on a data recorder in the 1930s. It was equipped with sensors that would optically project around 10 parameters onto a photographic film.
- This film ran continuously in a box that was constructed to prevent any light from entering it, lending it the name “black box”. The name has endured, even as the outer box of the recorder has always been orange – a bright colour that makes it easier to identify the metal case.
How do black boxes help understand airplane crashes?
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- Most aircraft are required to be equipped with two black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) — that record the information about a flight and help reconstruct the events leading to an aircraft accident.
- While the CVR records radio transmissions and other sounds in the cockpit, such as conversations between the pilots and engine noises, the flight data recorder records more than 80 different types of information, such as altitude, airspeed, flight heading, vertical acceleration, pitch, roll, autopilot status, etc.
- It usually takes at least 10-15 days to analyse the data recovered from the black boxes after a crash.
Where are black boxes placed, and how do they withstand crashes?
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- The recording devices are stored inside a unit that is generally made out of strong substances such as steel or titanium and are also insulated from factors such as extreme heat, cold or wetness. To protect these black boxes, they are equipped towards the tail end of the aircraft, where the impact of a crash is usually the least.
- It usually takes at least 10-15 days to analyse the data recovered from the black boxes after a crash.
Source:
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