12 ms·

The inventor of the black box was told to drop the idea

216 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

slipframe 5y ago
Well if this idea can't survive being dropped, it's not much good is it? Sorry... > Interestingly, modern flight data recorders are required to have an underwater locator beacon that pulses once per second at 37.5 kilohertz for 30 days and is supposed to be detectable at depths of at least 14,000 feet (4,267 meters). But they don’t have comparable beacons for crashes on land. After Japan Airlines Flight 123, that is shocking to me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- na85 5y ago
  >But they don’t have comparable beacons for crashes on land. Well, they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_radiobeacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_... But the reason you need underwater beacons in particular is that the water absorbs RF signals, so you'll actually use acoustic beacons underwater. Such a device would be useless above the water since air is so much less dense.
  - slipframe 5y ago
    From what I understand in America, small airplanes are required to have ELTs/EPIRBs, but airliners are exempt. I don't know why that would be, maybe lobbying.
    - FooHentai 5y ago
      Possibly their size means they're remote trackable (e.g. radar) already by gov/military when over or near land. This may not be the case with small aircraft. Total guess, of course.
redis_mlc 5y ago
The black box has worked well for all in Common Law countries. In countries with French-style law, that might be different for pilots. (Essentially you're guilty until proven innocent, and they hire a retired judge with nothing better to do except to drag out the hearings (and fees) until they die.) However the scale has tipped recently in the US with a central pilot records database being created recently. So at every step of your career, you're recorded and tracked. If an employer doesn't like you, they can scribble whatever they want in your permanent government record now. So before a pilot candidate spends $200,000 on a college education and pilot training, they need to think about both losing their medical at any time, and what will happen if their airline decides to fire them and give them a hard time.
- markdown 5y ago
  > $200,000 on a college education and pilot training, they need to think about both losing their medical at any time In my country Loss of License insurance removes that as a risk for pilots.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    In the US there is loss of medical insurance (essentially disability insurance) available in most scenarios from several providers, provided somebody pays for it. Note there's always policy fine-print and limits. But there's no loss of certificate insurance product available. The FAA pads any complaint with "reckless", which is up to their sole opinion.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- p_l 5y ago
  In Roman law you're also innocent until proven guilty - and the unwritten law in most countries is that prosecution doesn't get to access accident investigation materials and has to order their own experts every time.
kken 5y ago
This inventor is probably joined by many others before him that had the same idea, were shrugged off and did not have the tenacity to follow up despite that. Another example for what is common wisdom: Execution is everything. The myth of the inventor-founder is something from the industrual age. Interesting how it still persists.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Why is it a myth? Whenever I read about the founding of a big name company there's very often a significant innovation that it's initially premised on. Disney - animated feature length film with sound, dogged vision of founder Post / Kelloggs - invention of breakfast cereal, invented by founder (Kellogg's invention stolen by Post) Carnegie steel - bridge prototype, highly risky and innovative endeavor Ford - division of labor Mars - caramel and nougat in chocolate, innovation over Hersheys' plain chocolate, invented by founder Google - pagerank, invented by founders
  - ggm 5y ago
    Post and Kellog have joint tenancy in weird theories about breakfast cereal and masturbation. I wouldn't class Post as a thief in this space. Also grape nuts are fantastic (and that isn't a joke about nutting)
  - username90 5y ago
    Mass production and factories had already been a thing for almost a century when Ford started his factories. It is like saying that the new innovation "computers" was behind Facebooks success.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nine_k 5y ago
      No, the Ford's innovation is division of labor while producing a complex thing, a car. Instead of a team working on various operations, Ford's system introduced workers who each did a very simple operation, without having to change or readjust. The need for coordination between workers was largely removed, replaced by the conveyor, seriously improving production speed.
kwdc 5y ago
Wow. History hasn't been kind. As is often the case around limited-mindset thinking. From TFA: "civil authorities said that “Dr Warren’s instrument has little immediate direct use in civil aircraft.” The Royal Australian Air Force likewise decided that “such a device is not required—the recorder would yield more expletives than explanations.” Well. No. Multiple air crashes across the world relied on recordings as a key part of their investigation. Especially when a plane lands in the Hudson, just to name one example. This is very telling: "Most damning was the Federation of Air Pilots, which declared that the device would be like “a spy flying alongside—no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening.” History wasn't kind here either. Just try and take off in a jet from a commercial airliner without the various safety equipment installed. The insurance companies alone will try to eat you alive, let alone every other agency. There's definitely a repeating theme around safety equipment and authority/authority figures. The ridicule at the start is definitely a common starting point. Seat belts and air bags were both ridiculous inventions. Then they weren't. Then they became required. Quote from elsewhere and not necessarily about flight recorders: "It has been said that any new idea must pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is subject to argument: third, it is accepted. The safety idea has reached the final stage. It is accepted." -- Earl B. Morgan, journal of Safety Engineering, 1917
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Fourth: in retrospect, it is seen as obvious :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- linspace 5y ago
  I guess one possible explanation is that having a black box in your plane is not useful to you, only for other people after you die. Pushing for the idea requires accepting you are going to screw up and some people will think that your job is preventing the airplane from crashing in the first place. It's obviously useful in the long term from a societal perspective, not from a short-term and individual point of view.
code_duck 5y ago
Good thing this idea didn’t go down in flames. (Sorry). Looking back, almost every great idea I’ve had has received negative support from people around me, who either didn’t understand it or had their own plans for me.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/pcGpz https://archive.is/pcGpz
Foomf 5y ago
I wonder why there was such a difference in responses between the Australians and the British. Was it just a culture difference?
- martyvis 5y ago
  But it was an interesting turnaround by the Aussies that they were the first country to mandate the flight data recorders.
dukoid 5y ago
Now that the technology is so inexpensive, we need to have them in cars!
- nine_k 5y ago
  Get a dashcam. I wonder how soon a car would be able to publish its metrics, like speed, motor rpm, data from ABS and brakes, etc via a protected Bluetooth channel, so that a dashcam or a phone could keep recording it, like the black box.
  - emilburzo 5y ago
    Now? You can already get those metrics from the car's OBD2 port. There are even dongles which have Bluetooth so you can see/record the metrics on your phone, so it shouldn't take much to get them on a dashcam.
  - jiofih 5y ago
    Dashcams pointing outwards are not legal in the EU due to privacy laws.
- valepape 5y ago
  Just don't IoT it, please.
  - Haga 5y ago
    To late
- FooHentai 5y ago
  Already a thing and quite widespread deployment. Mandated in the US, Japan, and Korea for many years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Well, ok. First you make it a crime for any authority to look at it for any reason that is not blameless safety investigations.
mongol 5y ago
The last sentences about uploading data to the cloud had not struck me before. It is such an obvious development, if not to replace so to complement. But perhaps there are challenges around it that are not obvious?
- nine_k 5y ago
  A plane more often has access to an atmospheric cloud than to a computing cloud, especially when flying over an ocean. Maybe Starlink could offer reasonable connectivity, even if intermittent.
  - astrange 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_satellite_communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_s...
- goatinaboat 5y ago
  It is such an obvious development, if not to replace so to complement. But perhaps there are challenges around it that are not obvious? You might be surprised how scant and expensive bandwidth becomes once you are out of sight of land
  - wanderingstan 5y ago
    Still, there are so many flights now that offer onboard Wifi, it’s seems silly not to back up flight recorder data to the cloud wherever possible.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Inventor: this is my indestructible black box for recording aircraft crashes. Reviewer: drop it. Inventor: this is a safety feature that will allow us to iterate plane design and save thousands of lives in the future! Reviewer: drop it. Inventor: this is extremely important for the future of aviation! Reviewer: drop it. Inventor: I WILL NOT storms off Reviewer: I just meant...show that it won't break? Never mind.
Proven 5y ago
I'm not surprised. The technically savvy HN readership is overwhelmingly against black-box designs.
WalterBright 5y ago
I've watched all the episodes of Aviation Disasters. The device missing from cockpits is the video recorder. Many investigations revolve around questions like what is the pilot looking at, what the instruments show, even who the heck is in the pilot's seat. Video can confirm switch settings and instrument readouts (the voice recorder is also used to confirm if the warning horns sounded properly). Instead, a lot of effort goes into trying to reconstruct this. Just put a dang video camera in the cockpit. I've also, for decades, advocated a camera that records flight operations at an airport. Just stick a couple in the tower pointed at the runways. Note that in the Concorde disaster, there was no video of the take-off. They had to rely on eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. The only video came later from some passenger in a car who happened to have a video cam at hand. That accidental video proved valuable. (It's a horrifying video.) I was surprised at all the vitriol opposition to pointing a camera at the runways. People confidently told me it would cost millions of dollars, and was completely infeasible. Jeez, anyone could buy a security camera that recorded on a loop for a few hundred. Every convenience store had them.
- zeusk 5y ago
  Couple of issues here; the first and foremost - recording people at their workplace. We can all argue how privacy is unreasonable in public but recording let alone pilots but anyone continuously at work will receive big pushback. Also video occupies much more data than most other streams of information stored on blackbox. This coupled with the fact that anything aviation related takes decades to get into widespread use and it was only quite recently that solid state storage became so dense and ubiquitous. Video surveillance at airports is getting more widespread, just search for SFO asiana.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    It's the same issue with the audio recording. The solution is it's in a loop, and those recordings are almost never released. As for video, VHS quality is about 1Gb per hour. Meaning you can put 64 hours on an ordinary USB stick about the size of my thumbnail. Furthermore, video recording has nothing to do with flying the airplane, so there are no safety/certification issues. It doesn't even have to be in a crashproof box. I know that airports now have video surveillance, but those cameras are pointed mostly at the tarmac for security purposes, not at the runways for flight ops.
austincheney 5y ago
Marc Andreessen describes his experiences seeking funding for Netscape as a disaster, particularly among the telecom giants of the age who had a potential stake in related businesses. Nobody thought the web or a web browser were worth investing in. Who would ever use those? The moral of these stories is that originality scares the shit of people. Good ideas are not immediately apparent.
femto 5y ago
Reading Wikipedia, David Warren died in 2010, and his coffin was labelled "FLIGHT RECORDER INVENTOR DO NOT OPEN". Nice. https://www.wsj.com/media/072310pod05.jpg https://www.wsj.com/media/072310pod05.jpg
refurb 5y ago
It kind of makes sense. If you had a high stakes job (human life, say a surgeon) and your boss wanted to record your every action, what would you think? I think the FAA’s approach of “we do accident investigations so we learn, not to blame” went pretty far in making the idea more acceptable.
tiku 5y ago
My idea was to make a lot of small transponders on the outside of a plane, that detach when in contact with seawater. And a few on long cables so that you could track that cable to the plane part. Those transponders could also have micro-sd cards with data on them.
- fatninja 5y ago
  fire is also another scenario.
ineedasername 5y ago
magnetized steel wire as the recording medium. I had no idea that was how recordings were (or at least could) be made at the time. Of course it makes sense-- early use of magnetic tape was something like nickel coated bronze, so there's no reason a wire couldn't also work. Just a bit of electronics history I wasn't aware of that I thought interesting.
- shultays 5y ago
  Here is a video on them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ihiTwJPCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ihiTwJPCc
- quintushoratius 5y ago
  I think part of the reason for using wire was for fire proofing. The recording would be salvageable even after intense fires. Later recorders used plastic tape but also have a water vessel. As the water boils it keeps the interior from going above 100C - until it boils away. The recorders are rated for maybe 30-60 minutes of direct exposure. Recent recorders use solid state storage and, still, water to keep the internal temperature lower.
rkachowski 5y ago
Tangental, but I wasn't aware of a ban on hobby radio activity during WW2 until I read this article. What would be the reasoning for that?
- jameshart 5y ago
  Probably a mix of: reserving supply of electronic components to military use; eliminating a possible cover story for spies; emission control to deny enemy navigation cues; limiting vectors for accidental information disclosure; creating an atmosphere of ‘We’re all engaged in this all out struggle together’; wartime bureaucratic expansion and overreach; and just generally more important things going on.
ajarmst 5y ago
There’s an interesting aside in that neither a CVR nor a FDR would have been helpful in figuring out the cause of the Comet disasters. The way they did was brilliant.

216 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

Well if this idea can't survive being dropped, it's not much good is it? Sorry... > Interestingly, modern flight data recorders are required to have an underwater locator beacon that pulses once per second at 37.5 kilohertz for 30 days and is supposed to be detectable at depths of at least 14,000 feet (4,267 meters). But they don’t have comparable beacons for crashes on land. After Japan Airlines Flight 123, that is shocking to me.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
na85 5y ago
>But they don’t have comparable beacons for crashes on land. Well, they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_radiobeacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_... But the reason you need underwater beacons in particular is that the water absorbs RF signals, so you'll actually use acoustic beacons underwater. Such a device would be useless above the water since air is so much less dense.
- slipframe 5y ago
  From what I understand in America, small airplanes are required to have ELTs/EPIRBs, but airliners are exempt. I don't know why that would be, maybe lobbying.
  - FooHentai 5y ago
    Possibly their size means they're remote trackable (e.g. radar) already by gov/military when over or near land. This may not be the case with small aircraft. Total guess, of course.

redis_mlc 5y ago

The black box has worked well for all in Common Law countries. In countries with French-style law, that might be different for pilots. (Essentially you're guilty until proven innocent, and they hire a retired judge with nothing better to do except to drag out the hearings (and fees) until they die.) However the scale has tipped recently in the US with a central pilot records database being created recently. So at every step of your career, you're recorded and tracked. If an employer doesn't like you, they can scribble whatever they want in your permanent government record now. So before a pilot candidate spends $200,000 on a college education and pilot training, they need to think about both losing their medical at any time, and what will happen if their airline decides to fire them and give them a hard time.

markdown 5y ago
> $200,000 on a college education and pilot training, they need to think about both losing their medical at any time In my country Loss of License insurance removes that as a risk for pilots.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  In the US there is loss of medical insurance (essentially disability insurance) available in most scenarios from several providers, provided somebody pays for it. Note there's always policy fine-print and limits. But there's no loss of certificate insurance product available. The FAA pads any complaint with "reckless", which is up to their sole opinion.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
p_l 5y ago
In Roman law you're also innocent until proven guilty - and the unwritten law in most countries is that prosecution doesn't get to access accident investigation materials and has to order their own experts every time.

kken 5y ago

This inventor is probably joined by many others before him that had the same idea, were shrugged off and did not have the tenacity to follow up despite that. Another example for what is common wisdom: Execution is everything. The myth of the inventor-founder is something from the industrual age. Interesting how it still persists.

fighterpilot 5y ago
Why is it a myth? Whenever I read about the founding of a big name company there's very often a significant innovation that it's initially premised on. Disney - animated feature length film with sound, dogged vision of founder Post / Kelloggs - invention of breakfast cereal, invented by founder (Kellogg's invention stolen by Post) Carnegie steel - bridge prototype, highly risky and innovative endeavor Ford - division of labor Mars - caramel and nougat in chocolate, innovation over Hersheys' plain chocolate, invented by founder Google - pagerank, invented by founders
- ggm 5y ago
  Post and Kellog have joint tenancy in weird theories about breakfast cereal and masturbation. I wouldn't class Post as a thief in this space. Also grape nuts are fantastic (and that isn't a joke about nutting)
- username90 5y ago
  Mass production and factories had already been a thing for almost a century when Ford started his factories. It is like saying that the new innovation "computers" was behind Facebooks success.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nine_k 5y ago
    No, the Ford's innovation is division of labor while producing a complex thing, a car. Instead of a team working on various operations, Ford's system introduced workers who each did a very simple operation, without having to change or readjust. The need for coordination between workers was largely removed, replaced by the conveyor, seriously improving production speed.

kwdc 5y ago

Wow. History hasn't been kind. As is often the case around limited-mindset thinking. From TFA: "civil authorities said that “Dr Warren’s instrument has little immediate direct use in civil aircraft.” The Royal Australian Air Force likewise decided that “such a device is not required—the recorder would yield more expletives than explanations.” Well. No. Multiple air crashes across the world relied on recordings as a key part of their investigation. Especially when a plane lands in the Hudson, just to name one example. This is very telling: "Most damning was the Federation of Air Pilots, which declared that the device would be like “a spy flying alongside—no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening.” History wasn't kind here either. Just try and take off in a jet from a commercial airliner without the various safety equipment installed. The insurance companies alone will try to eat you alive, let alone every other agency. There's definitely a repeating theme around safety equipment and authority/authority figures. The ridicule at the start is definitely a common starting point. Seat belts and air bags were both ridiculous inventions. Then they weren't. Then they became required. Quote from elsewhere and not necessarily about flight recorders: "It has been said that any new idea must pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is subject to argument: third, it is accepted. The safety idea has reached the final stage. It is accepted." -- Earl B. Morgan, journal of Safety Engineering, 1917

robertlagrant 5y ago
Fourth: in retrospect, it is seen as obvious :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
linspace 5y ago
I guess one possible explanation is that having a black box in your plane is not useful to you, only for other people after you die. Pushing for the idea requires accepting you are going to screw up and some people will think that your job is preventing the airplane from crashing in the first place. It's obviously useful in the long term from a societal perspective, not from a short-term and individual point of view.

code_duck 5y ago

Good thing this idea didn’t go down in flames. (Sorry). Looking back, almost every great idea I’ve had has received negative support from people around me, who either didn’t understand it or had their own plans for me.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/pcGpz https://archive.is/pcGpz

Foomf 5y ago

I wonder why there was such a difference in responses between the Australians and the British. Was it just a culture difference?

martyvis 5y ago
But it was an interesting turnaround by the Aussies that they were the first country to mandate the flight data recorders.

dukoid 5y ago

Now that the technology is so inexpensive, we need to have them in cars!

nine_k 5y ago
Get a dashcam. I wonder how soon a car would be able to publish its metrics, like speed, motor rpm, data from ABS and brakes, etc via a protected Bluetooth channel, so that a dashcam or a phone could keep recording it, like the black box.
- emilburzo 5y ago
  Now? You can already get those metrics from the car's OBD2 port. There are even dongles which have Bluetooth so you can see/record the metrics on your phone, so it shouldn't take much to get them on a dashcam.
- jiofih 5y ago
  Dashcams pointing outwards are not legal in the EU due to privacy laws.
valepape 5y ago
Just don't IoT it, please.
- Haga 5y ago
  To late
FooHentai 5y ago
Already a thing and quite widespread deployment. Mandated in the US, Japan, and Korea for many years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder
marcosdumay 5y ago
Well, ok. First you make it a crime for any authority to look at it for any reason that is not blameless safety investigations.

mongol 5y ago

The last sentences about uploading data to the cloud had not struck me before. It is such an obvious development, if not to replace so to complement. But perhaps there are challenges around it that are not obvious?

nine_k 5y ago
A plane more often has access to an atmospheric cloud than to a computing cloud, especially when flying over an ocean. Maybe Starlink could offer reasonable connectivity, even if intermittent.
- astrange 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_satellite_communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370_s...
goatinaboat 5y ago
It is such an obvious development, if not to replace so to complement. But perhaps there are challenges around it that are not obvious? You might be surprised how scant and expensive bandwidth becomes once you are out of sight of land
- wanderingstan 5y ago
  Still, there are so many flights now that offer onboard Wifi, it’s seems silly not to back up flight recorder data to the cloud wherever possible.

robertlagrant 5y ago

Inventor: this is my indestructible black box for recording aircraft crashes. Reviewer: drop it. Inventor: this is a safety feature that will allow us to iterate plane design and save thousands of lives in the future! Reviewer: drop it. Inventor: this is extremely important for the future of aviation! Reviewer: drop it. Inventor: I WILL NOT storms off Reviewer: I just meant...show that it won't break? Never mind.

Proven 5y ago

I'm not surprised. The technically savvy HN readership is overwhelmingly against black-box designs.

WalterBright 5y ago

I've watched all the episodes of Aviation Disasters. The device missing from cockpits is the video recorder. Many investigations revolve around questions like what is the pilot looking at, what the instruments show, even who the heck is in the pilot's seat. Video can confirm switch settings and instrument readouts (the voice recorder is also used to confirm if the warning horns sounded properly). Instead, a lot of effort goes into trying to reconstruct this. Just put a dang video camera in the cockpit. I've also, for decades, advocated a camera that records flight operations at an airport. Just stick a couple in the tower pointed at the runways. Note that in the Concorde disaster, there was no video of the take-off. They had to rely on eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. The only video came later from some passenger in a car who happened to have a video cam at hand. That accidental video proved valuable. (It's a horrifying video.) I was surprised at all the vitriol opposition to pointing a camera at the runways. People confidently told me it would cost millions of dollars, and was completely infeasible. Jeez, anyone could buy a security camera that recorded on a loop for a few hundred. Every convenience store had them.

zeusk 5y ago
Couple of issues here; the first and foremost - recording people at their workplace. We can all argue how privacy is unreasonable in public but recording let alone pilots but anyone continuously at work will receive big pushback. Also video occupies much more data than most other streams of information stored on blackbox. This coupled with the fact that anything aviation related takes decades to get into widespread use and it was only quite recently that solid state storage became so dense and ubiquitous. Video surveillance at airports is getting more widespread, just search for SFO asiana.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It's the same issue with the audio recording. The solution is it's in a loop, and those recordings are almost never released. As for video, VHS quality is about 1Gb per hour. Meaning you can put 64 hours on an ordinary USB stick about the size of my thumbnail. Furthermore, video recording has nothing to do with flying the airplane, so there are no safety/certification issues. It doesn't even have to be in a crashproof box. I know that airports now have video surveillance, but those cameras are pointed mostly at the tarmac for security purposes, not at the runways for flight ops.

austincheney 5y ago

Marc Andreessen describes his experiences seeking funding for Netscape as a disaster, particularly among the telecom giants of the age who had a potential stake in related businesses. Nobody thought the web or a web browser were worth investing in. Who would ever use those? The moral of these stories is that originality scares the shit of people. Good ideas are not immediately apparent.

femto 5y ago

Reading Wikipedia, David Warren died in 2010, and his coffin was labelled "FLIGHT RECORDER INVENTOR DO NOT OPEN". Nice. https://www.wsj.com/media/072310pod05.jpg https://www.wsj.com/media/072310pod05.jpg

refurb 5y ago

It kind of makes sense. If you had a high stakes job (human life, say a surgeon) and your boss wanted to record your every action, what would you think? I think the FAA’s approach of “we do accident investigations so we learn, not to blame” went pretty far in making the idea more acceptable.

tiku 5y ago

My idea was to make a lot of small transponders on the outside of a plane, that detach when in contact with seawater. And a few on long cables so that you could track that cable to the plane part. Those transponders could also have micro-sd cards with data on them.

fatninja 5y ago
fire is also another scenario.

ineedasername 5y ago

magnetized steel wire as the recording medium. I had no idea that was how recordings were (or at least could) be made at the time. Of course it makes sense-- early use of magnetic tape was something like nickel coated bronze, so there's no reason a wire couldn't also work. Just a bit of electronics history I wasn't aware of that I thought interesting.

shultays 5y ago
Here is a video on them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ihiTwJPCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ihiTwJPCc
quintushoratius 5y ago
I think part of the reason for using wire was for fire proofing. The recording would be salvageable even after intense fires. Later recorders used plastic tape but also have a water vessel. As the water boils it keeps the interior from going above 100C - until it boils away. The recorders are rated for maybe 30-60 minutes of direct exposure. Recent recorders use solid state storage and, still, water to keep the internal temperature lower.

rkachowski 5y ago

Tangental, but I wasn't aware of a ban on hobby radio activity during WW2 until I read this article. What would be the reasoning for that?

jameshart 5y ago
Probably a mix of: reserving supply of electronic components to military use; eliminating a possible cover story for spies; emission control to deny enemy navigation cues; limiting vectors for accidental information disclosure; creating an atmosphere of ‘We’re all engaged in this all out struggle together’; wartime bureaucratic expansion and overreach; and just generally more important things going on.

ajarmst 5y ago

There’s an interesting aside in that neither a CVR nor a FDR would have been helpful in figuring out the cause of the Comet disasters. The way they did was brilliant.