Episode 7
Black Box

Broadcast 6.30pm on 7/8/2002

On a serious aviation note, it's a horrible fact of life that, high-tech or low-tech, planes do crash, sometimes due to pilot error or flight control problems or other reasons, natural or man-made. These days, of course, the experts can often get to the reasons via one of these things – the black box flight recorder. But you may not know that the bloke who developed the black box, now used all over the world, was an Australian, David Warren.

DAVID WARREN, INVENTOR OF BLACK BOX FLIGHT RECORDER: The idea for the black box came to me 50-something years ago when the world was at the beginning of the jet age and the first jet airliner had a series of problems culminating in one major crash, in 1953, when a Comet crashed without any explanation, without any witnesses, without any survivors to tell what... A really baffling mystery.

I had seen at a trade fair a gadget which fascinated me. It was the world's first miniature recorder – to put in your pocket. I put the two ideas together. If a businessman had been using one of these in the plane and we could find it in the wreckage, and we played it back, we'd say, "Look, we know what caused this."

I wrote a report – 'A Device For Assisting Investigation Into Aircraft Accidents'.

The recorder we built for demonstration of the idea consisted of wire being fed backwards and forwards on these spools. And the whole thing was this size – very small, and made out of Minifon bits. And the bottom part there, you'll see, I still have the original. And that had all the electronics to mix the voice and the data bits together.

We finished developing this to this stage and found that people weren't interested. We wrote to the Department of Civil Aviation and the letter we got back said, "Dr Warren's instrument has little immediate, direct use in civil aviation."

An English firm pounced on the idea and put out a recorder, built on our principles, using wire, called the Red Egg. It was the world's first commercial recorder which could be used for voice or data or both. They were called Red Eggs, because even our first one we painted red so that you could find it in a crash.

It was called black box because in the records of my meeting in London, when it was first demonstrated and they were so keen, one of the people in the discussion afterwards said, "This is a wonderful black box."

It was a part-time involvement for 15 years before I got a little sign on the bottom signed by our then superintendent saying, "I think now our job is done, Dave. We'll call this a day."

GEORGE NEGUS: David Warren there – the man who came up with the black box. Without doubt, one of the most important devices ever in aviation history. And, by the way, they're not just used in big aircraft. This one, for instance, back in 1988 helped investigators establish the cause of a helicopter crash in the Timor Sea, north of Cape York.

If you've learned nothing else tonight, you've learned that the famous black box is not black at all.