The real story
In 1934, when David Warren was nine, his father was killed when the airliner Miss Hobart vanished over Bass Strait. Twenty years later, as a fuel chemist at Australia's Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne, he helped look into the mysterious crashes of the Comet, the world's first jet airliner, and realised investigators needed a recording of the cockpit. By 1958 his team had a prototype that captured both voices and flight data.
Today's recorders are painted 'international orange' and built to survive an impact of 3,400 g and a 1,100 °C fire for an hour, while their underwater beacons ping for 30 to 90 days. Nobody agrees where the name 'black box' came from; theories include secret wartime electronics in black cases and early recorders that used light-tight film. What they record is used to prevent the next accident, not to assign blame.
