The black box flight recorder, now a required feature on all aircraft, was the brainchild of Australian aviation scientist David Warren (b. 1925), whose own father was killed in a plane crash in 1934.
After World War II, there was a massive rise in commercial air travel, but after several planes came down in unexplained circumstances, the public's confidence in flying was understandably shaken. In 1953, Warren was part of the team investigating the crash of the world's first jet-powered passenger plane—the Comet. He thought how useful it would be to have an account of the events inside the plane during the last moments before it came down, and so he set out to develop a crash-proof device that could record sound and instrument readings in the cockpit. He built a prototype called the "ARL Flight Memory Unit" that could record up to four hours of speech onto steel wire. Little interest was aroused in his native Australia, but the British first took up the design in 1958.
After another unexplained crash in Queensland in 1960, Australia became the first country in the world to make black box recorders mandatory on all its aircraft. Modern planes now have two black box devices (which are actually bright orange): the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FOR), both of which are located in the aircraft's tail. They record everything from cockpit and radio communications, to airspeed, altitude, and engine temperature. The recorders are encased in materials such as titanium, and are insulated to survive the huge impact of a crash so that they may help investigators piece together the events prior to an accident.
