Black box (transportation)
The term black box is a placeholder name used casually, often by journalists, to refer to a collection of several different recording devices used in transportation: the flight recorders (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) in aircraft, the event recorder in railway locomotives, the event data recorder in automobiles and other recording devices in various vehicles.
Black box can also be used in physics and electronics to describe a mechanism in which the input and expected outputs are well understood but whose internal operations are deliberately and completely unknown, but this has no special connection with recording devices.
Origin
Red Egg
The black box term originated when after a meeting about the first commercial flight recorder named the "Red Egg" for its color and shape, someone commented: "This is a wonderful black box". Black box is a more humorous than accurate term and is almost never used within the flight safety industry.[citation needed] The recorders are generally not black in color, but usually bright orange (as pictured) as they are intended to be spotted and recovered after incidents, nor are their operations unknown.
Box-of-tricks
An alternative origin of the word is from World War II RAF terminology. During the period 1940-1945 new electronic innovations, such as Oboe, GEE and H2S, were added to aircraft (specifically bombers) on a regular basis. The prototypes were roughly covered in hand-made metal boxes, painted black to prevent reflections. After a time any piece of "new" electronics was referred to as the "box-of-tricks" or the "black-box". The expression made its way into post-war civil aviation and, ultimately, general usage.
See also
- Annex: Acronyms and abbreviations in avionics
- Flight recorder
- Train event recorder
- Voyage Data Recorder
- Event data recorder
- Data logger
- Korean Air Lines Flight 007
External links
- Heavy Vehicle EDR information site for black box technology
- ABC TV (Australia) Dr David Warren interview transcript 2003
- ABC TV (Australia) Dr David Warren interview transcript 2002
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