After researching the fall of the first commercial jet plane, the Comet, as part of the Aeronautics Research Laboratory in Sydney, and after seeing a small recording device at a trade fair, he decided to combine the two and thus was born the "black box" that records what happens on the plane
David Warren (1925–2010), Australian research scientist, invented the 'black box' flight data recorder.
Warren attended university in Sydney and Melbourne and completed a doctorate in London. In 1947 he became a chemistry lecturer at the University of Sydney.
Warren was a researcher at the Australian Aeronautical Research Laboratory (ARL) in Melbourne. In the mid-XNUMXs he was involved in the accident investigations related to the mysterious crash of the first jet-powered commercial airliner, Comet. After the incident it occurred to him that it would be most useful if there was a record of what happened in the plane immediately before the crash. Then David remembered the world's first miniature tape recorder he had recently seen at a trade fair. Suddenly he could imagine such a recorder placed in all planes, constantly recording details and able to recover after a crash.
He envisioned a machine that would be installed in all airplanes, and which would continuously record details in such a way that they could be quickly recovered after a crash.
His first prototype attracted little local attention. In 1958, during an unofficial visit to the ARL by Sir Robert Hardingham, the former British Air Vice Marshal, the hacking began. Warren was asked to present his 'unofficial project' during lunch. Immediately Sir Robert saw the potential. David and his black box boarded a flight to England almost immediately. The reception there was most encouraging. The Ministry of Aviation has announced that it will soon be mandatory to install the black box flight recorder to read instruments. The black box was also successfully demonstrated in Canada. In America, the authorities rejected the Australian embassy's invitation to present the device.
Only after the investigation of a crash that occurred in Queensland in May 1960 was Australia the first country in the world to require voice recording in the cockpit. The flight recorder known as the 'black box' has since been adopted as a means of investigating accidents and preventing their recurrence.
It should be noted that the color of the black box is never black, but bright orange to make it easy to locate at the crash scene.
Warren has published many scientific articles on a variety of topics and has won awards including the Royal Air Society's Lawrence Hagarev Award (2001) and the Royal Society of Arts and Communications' Hartnett Medal (2000).
The black box cannot be used in the case of missing planes, such as Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014, although it turns out that one of the devices was in regular contact with the manufacturer, and the last signal was from him.
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