Black boxes

Subject: Science and tech

Context:

Investigators have found the “black boxes” of the ill-fated Boeing 737-800 aircraft which get crashed at Kozhikode

Concept:

• The black boxes are two orange metallic boxes containing the recorders which date back to the early 1950s, when, following plane crashes, investigators were unable to arrive a conclusive cause for the accidents and deemed it necessary to install the said recorders on aircraft.
• In the initial days of the black box, the information was recorded on to a metal strip, which was then upgraded to magnetic drives succeeded by solid state memory chips.
• Most aircraft are required to be equipped with two black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) that record the information about a flight and help reconstruct the events leading to an aircraft accident.
• While the CVR records radio transmissions and other sounds in the cockpit such as conversations between the pilots and engine noises, the flight data recorder records more than 80 different types of information such as altitude, airspeed, flight heading, vertical acceleration, pitch, roll, autopilot status etc.

Table top runaway

• Tabletop runways are generally constructed by chopping off the top of a hill, and are often thought of as tricky for landings because of the lack of any margin for overshooting the runway.
• In addition to the airports at Kozhikode and Mangaluru, the Lengpui airport in Mizoram, Pakyong airport in Sikkim, and Simla and Kullu in Himachal Pradesh are built on tabletops. Other tabletop airports outside India include Paro in Bhutan and Kathmandu in Nepal.