What is Black Box, How this can reveal the truth of CDS helicopter crash?

Ground Report | New Delhi: What is Black Box; India’s first Chief of Defense Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat passed away along with his wife Madhulika Rawat and 11 others aboard the helicopter in an unfortunate Indian Air Force (IAF) chopper accident.

Official sources said the black box was retrieved in view of the authorities expanding the search area from 300 meters to one km from the accident site.

The black box will provide critical data on the chain of events that led to the tragedy on the hills on Wednesday, when 63-year-old Rawat, his wife, and 11 others, the country's first CDS, were killed while traveling by a Mi-17 VH helicopter. Crashed and went up in flames, leaving only one survivor.

The black box was retrieved in the wake of officials expanding the search area from 300 meters to one km from the crash site. Official sources told PTI that two boxes including a flight data recorder have been recovered from the spot. They are likely to be taken to Delhi or Bengaluru to ascertain the cause of the accident.

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What is Black Box?

Despite its name, the black box is neither black in color nor does it look like a box. Although called a black box, the flight data recorder is painted bright orange and records flight data and cockpit conversations.

Many historians attribute their invention to the Australian scientist David Warren in the 1950s. In particular, a black box is mandatory for all commercial airliners and the armed forces.

How this can reveal the truth

According to experts, the flight recorder also stores private conversations between pilots, making it important in the event of an accident as it can provide important details about the events that led to the accident.

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There are two types of flight recording equipment: the flight data recorder (FDR) which stores all recent history of flight through the recording of dozens of parameters collected several times per second and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) which stores the cockpit sound. Records it, including pilot conversations.

Investigators prefer to act methodically but in the case of a major tragedy, the pressure from the public and the media can be intense. Depending on any damage to the boxes and the type of accident, some investigators say they can get a very basic idea within days or hours. But they emphasize that this is not always the case and is rarely the full story. Interim reports are published after a month but are often sparse. A thorough investigation takes a year or more to complete. A Lebanese investigation into the 2010 Ethiopian Airlines crash took two years.

Technicians remove the protective material and clean the connections carefully to make sure they don't accidentally erase data. The audio or data file must be downloaded and copied. Data means nothing at first. It must be decoded from raw files before converting to the graph. Investigators sometimes use "spectral analysis"—a method of examining sounds that allow scientists to pick up on a barely audible alarm or the first fleeting crack of an explosion.

What's inside the blackbox?

• A black box weighs about 10 pounds (4.5 kg) and consists of four main parts

• Chassis or interface designed to fix the device and facilitate recording and playback
• an underwater locator beacon

• A core housing or 'crash survivable memory unit' made of stainless steel or titanium.

• Inside there, there are precious finger-nail-sized recording chips on circuit boards that could help decide the near-future fate of Boeing's grounded 737 MAX, in the latest case.

• There are two recorders: a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and a flight data recorder (FDR) for pilot voices or cockpit sounds.

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