Kolkata: According to reports, the authorities have found the black box which can shed light on why the Air India flight crashed in Ahmedabad. The device was reportedly found on the roof of the doctors’ hostel that the aircraft hit. A team of the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) helped by Gujarat government’s 40 personnel found the black box.
On June 12, an Air India flight operating from Ahmedabad to London crashed shortly after its take off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft had 230 passengers and 12 crew members, totaling 242 people on board, out of which only one person has survived as per reports.
The plane departed from Ahmedabad airport at 1.17pm and was scheduled to arrive in London at 6.09pm. However, it went down moments after take-off, crashing into a densely populated neighborhood close to the airport.
What is a black box?
A black box is a crucial part of an aircraft. It is a small machine that records an aircraft’s information during its operation. A sort of flight recorder, the black box originated in the early 1950s and it made in a way to withstand explosions, fire, water pressure, and high-speed crashes.
The invention of black box is attributed to Australian scientist David Ronald de Mey Warren and it is used to reveal the reason behind the crash of an airplane. Normally, a black box consists of two recorders, a cockpit voice recorder for pilot voices and cockpit sounds, and a separate flight data recorder which logs critical technical parameters including altitude, speed, engine thrust, and flight path data.
There have been case when a plane has crashed into water bodies. Hence, to make the black boxes discoverable when underwater, they consist a beacon that sends out ultrasound signals for 30 days. There are four parts inside a black box, including underwater locator beacon, an interface to facilitate recording and playback, the recording chip on a circuit board and a memory unit that can survive crash and withstand a force equivalent to 3,400 times the force of gravity.
Black box helps investigators unravel the events that lead to a crash. It gives everyone an idea of what happened in the cockpit and across aircraft systems. It acts like a DNA evidence in criminal cases and gives a definitive, unbiased testimony of the incident.
