The shocking death of Indian Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat with his wife and 12 others aboard a helicopter has ignite the debate around flight safety. The black box of Indian Air Force Mi-17V5 helicopter was retrieve by officials.
The helicopter which crash near Coonoor in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has initiate a tri-service inquiry into the crash.
The black box could reveal the details of why and how the helicopter crash.
Black box, the orange device is essentially a recorder of all flight data, including conversations that take place in the cockpit.
What is a Black Box?
In all flights and helicopters, a black box is place to record events in case of the worst-case scenarios, for accidents like the one that cause the death of General Bipin Rawat.
A black box recorder is similar to a hard disk or a memory card and records more than 80 vital parameters of a flight like altitude, airspeed, air pressure, cockpit conversations, and autopilot status, roll, pitch among many.
Most flights have two black boxes :
- Cockpit voice recorder (CVR)
- Flight data recorder (FDR)
These help investigators knit together the events that led to the crash.
The earliest black boxes, which were introduce in the 1950s had metal strips that record the information, replace by magnetic drives eventually.
The current generation of black boxes run on solid state memory chips.
Most black boxes are place inside units made out of strong material like steel or titanium that also offer protection from heat, cold and water.
Most aircraft have black boxes in the tail where the flight is least likely to be impact.
To ensure black boxes can be find under water, they are equip with a beacon that sends out ultrasound signals for at least a month.
In most circumstances, it can take up to 2 weeks to analyse the data recover from the black box of an aircraft.
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