'Black box' of crashed plane found

Pakistan

'Black box' of crashed plane found

Close

31 July,2010 02:55 pm

Recovery workers on Saturday found the black box flight data recorder from the wreckage of Pakistan's worst-ever plane crash, though its condition was unclear, a government official said.The discovery could shed light on why the Airblue flight crashed Wednesday into the hills overlooking the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, killing all 152 people onboard.The black box was found following a difficult recovery effort hampered by rain, mud and a lack of proper roads in the heavily forested Margalla Hills. It has been handed to aviation officials, said Ramzan Sajid, a spokesman for the Capital Development Authority, a government agency. The plane an Airbus A321 model had been ordered to take an alternative approach to the runway at Islamabad airport but had apparently veered off course, the Civil Aviation Authority said earlier this week. Officials said the plane had lost contact with the control tower before the crash, which occurred during stormy weather.Talking to Dunya News, DG Civil Aviation Authority Air Commodore said that the black box is would be sent abroad for decoding. What is Black Box? In aviation, a black box (they are actually bright orange, to facilitate their being found after a crash) is an audio recording device in the cockpit of an airplane or helicopter. It records the conversation of the pilots during a flight, so if something goes very wrong, investigators can use the black box recording to determine what happened.In 1953, Australian engineer Dr. David Warren conceived a device that would record not only the instruments reading, but also the cockpit voices, when working with the Defence Science and Technology Organisations' Aeronautical Research Laboratory (Melbourne, Australia). He built the first prototype in 1958.It was not until after the 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision that black boxes of any kind were installed on commercial airplanes. In 1965 black boxes were redesigned and moved to the rear of airplanes to improve the probability of successful data retrieval after a crash.