Black box: Inside a flight data recorder

[Music] if an airplane goes down it's the infamous black box that gives us information about the planes speed and altitude before the crash so how do you make something that can record all that information with still withstand impact 3,000 times the force of gravity and temperatures of up to a thousand degrees Celsius well the answer isn't this flimsy outer casing but instead it's this framework and especially the magazine held inside this is made from steel and you can see here that Delta Airlines logo I bought this on eBay for about a hundred bucks the magazine shows the key components that allow the black box to record information so consistently and durably inconel steel this metallic foil records flight parameters they're engraved or scratched onto the inconel sheet in fact the real name for this device is a foil a Scylla graphic recorder tucked away inside the black box we see instruments that measure altitude and airspeed they're right here two other instruments are buried in the black box they measure magnetic heading and vertical acceleration now if you look through the front you can see that there's a small arm attached to each instrument a very tough piece of metal on the tip cuts the gauges readings into the roll of metal in the magazine this system of gears moves the foil at six inches per hour and a spool is 200 feet long meaning it can record 400 hours of the footage as you can see here on this gauge the key to making the black box work is the inconel metal used in the magazine typically used in furnaces it's resistant to corrosion and oxidation and when it's heated high enough temperatures it forms an oxide layer that protects the surface from further attack now today's black boxes are typically solid-state of course digital but you know I still love these old flight data recorders they show the ingenuity of the engineers and using inconel steel in the magazine one of the few substances that could do the job i'm bill hammack the engineerguy you [Music]

Channel: engineerguy

Views: 608,271

Rating: 4.9595556 out of 5

Keywords: Bill Hammack, University of Illinois, engineer guy, black box, flight data reco rder, DC 9, Boeing 727

Id: xlY5W7be5jU

Length: 2min 15sec (135 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2010