Black box (transportation)
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The term Black Box is used casually, often by journalists, to refer to a collection of several different recording devices used in transportation: the flight data recorder, flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder in aircraft, the event recorder in railway diesel locomotives, the Event Data Recorder in automobiles and other recording devices in various vehicles. Black box (systems) is also a term used in physics and electronics to describe a mechanism in which the input and expected outputs are well understood but whose internal operations are deliberately and completely unknown, but this has no special connection with recording devices.
The black box term originated when after a meeting about the first commercial flight recorder, named the "Red Egg" for its colour and shape, someone commented that, "This is a wonderful black box." Black box is more a humorous cadigan than an accurate term (the recorders are not generally black in colour, nor are their operations unknown), and is almost never used within the flight safety industry.
A number of observational comedians have joked that, because the box seems to be indestructible, the substance used to make the box should be used to make the entire aeroplane.
[edit] See also
- Flight data recorder
- Flight recorder
- Cockpit voice recorder
- Train event recorder
- Event Data Recorder
- Voyage Data Recorder
[edit] External links
- ABC TV (Australia) Dr David Warren interview transcript 2003
- ABC TV (Australia) Dr David Warren interview transcript 2002
