How It's Used

"The investigation by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch will question all those involved and check the plane's 'black box' flight data and cockpit voice recorders. The Boeing 777 was launched in June 1995 and is considered an extremely reliable aircraft with an almost impeccable safety record. It is powered by two Rolls Royce engines but should still fly if one fails."

—David Williams, "Everyone Was Screaming. Kids Were Crying...We Thought We Were Going to Die," The Daily Mail (UK), January 18, 2008.

"Since this was a catastrophe with no survivors, we can only have brief generic impressions (and the show, to its credit, does keep them brief) of what went on among the passengers. Conversation in the cockpit is reproduced, presumably in a literal reconstruction of the last recorded moments from the plane's black box, retrieved from 6,000 feet below the surface of the ocean...

"Canadian, British and Indian officials are all involved. Air India's chief investigator, a Mr. H.S. Khola, spells out with a true sleuth's delight the reasons why the black box was crucial to determining whether the crash was due to sabotage or mechanical malfunction: 'If there's any mechanical problem, the crew will be talking about the problem, they will not be silent about the problem.' We hear this for ourselves in a twice-played scene. One moment the captain and his co-pilot are exchanging humdrum information about insurance seals, the next—well, there isn't a next moment. That's when there's silence. The computers went out, along with everything else on board."

—Robert Cushman, "An airborne procedural: Discovery's Mayday tackles Air India 182," The National Post (Canada), April 9, 2008.

“Judging from the cockpit voice recordings captured by the Legacy’s black box and later recovered by investigators, their English was New York–accented—and no less so when they enunciated for the locals.”

—William Langewiesche, “The Devil at 37,000 Feet,” Vanity Fair, January, 2009.

"Early reports that one of the plane’s black boxes had been found were denied. Yemenia and the French Office for Investigations and Analyses, which investigates air accidents, were sending investigators, accompanied by Airbus specialists."

—Steven Erlanger, "152 Dead in Crash, and One Story of Survival," The New York Times, July 1, 2009.

"On Wednesday, two ships slowly continued to troll the Atlantic Ocean hundreds of miles off the northeastern coast of Brazil, towing two U.S. Navy black box pinger locators, said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Lorenzo Harris, part of the American team helping to oversee the search. No signals from the plane's black boxes have been heard."

—Greg Keller, "Air France Pilots Demand Probe into Speed Sensors," The Washington Post, July 8, 2009.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
Black Box
Black Box Theater
Black Box Warnings on Pharmaceuticals

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on Black Boxes for Transportation
The Straight Dope article "If aircraft 'black boxes' are indestructible, why can't the whole plane be made from the same material?"