The Boxes That Aren’t Black
On March 21st, 2022, a Boeing 737-800 passenger jet tragically plummeted to the ground in China, killing all 132 people on board, leaving nothing but debris at the crash site.
Chinese Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 was on its way from Kunming to Guangzhou when it plunged into a nosedive that experts say is quite strange. The 737-800 is the most common Boeing aircraft in use, 4502 of which are in use worldwide. It’s the second most common plane worldwide after the A320, manufactured by Boeing’s rival Airbus.
So far, investigators have recovered one of the “black boxes” from Flight 5735. What are these black boxes anyway? Well, they’re burn-proof, crash-proof, virtually indestructible safes. Oh, and here’s another fact about these boxes: They’re not black. The media calls them “black boxes,” but the boxes are frankly international orange, like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and the term is quite outdated.
What are these boxes protecting, anyway? The short answer is every crucial (and sometimes useless) thing about an airplane that could help crack the case of a crash. However, this data gets stored in two separate boxes. One, known as the Flight Data Recorder (FDR), records information such as altitude, time, the temperature in the passenger cabin and luggage compartment, etc., recording data about the aircraft for roughly the last 25 hours. The other one, the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), records everything in the cockpit for the latest two hours, including sound from the pilots’ headset microphones. The black box developed in the dawn of the aviation industry when experts realized it would be helpful to have a recorder on board to get the facts of why crashes happened. Data used to get etched onto metal foil, then, using electromagnets, were recorded onto magnetic tape. Now they’re stored onto solid-state memory chips. The chips are protected thoroughly with a thick casing of steel or titanium and fire-resistant substances. As a precaution, these boxes get located towards the back of the plane, where the impact gets slightly lessened.
In the case of Chinese Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, investigators still haven’t found the cause of why the aircraft suddenly nosedived. Some speculate that it could have been deliberate, while others don’t think so. With the recovery of one of the black boxes, recognized as the CVR, we may be creeping closer to the truth. So how do people recover these black boxes in the first place? If a plane crashes into water, there’s a sensor that, when in contact with water, would start sending an electric pulse signal every second for up to 30 days, which could travel through 14,000 feet, roughly equivalent to 4270 meters. If aircraft crashes into the land, the black box would usually be nearby the wreckage and could get more easily recovered. But those that never get recovered are rendered useless no matter the tech in them.
The CVR from Flight 5735 is currently getting shipped to Beijing for analysis via machines. These machines would scan the memory board, translate the binary code on it, and hopefully, let us understand more of the circumstances leading up to the crash. Chinese Eastern Airlines has grounded all of their 737-800s, which probably wouldn’t be taking off soon. That’s the end of this production from the New News Newsminute. Thank you, and remember to stay safe.