The Secret Sauce of an Airplane’s Black Box [Black Box]

A flight data recorder -the ” black box ” in every commercial airplane-is an important tool for dissecting what went wrong within the aftermath of a crash. Here’s the main to its survival.

The black box dismantled here by Prof. Bill Hammack is a Sundstrand FA-542, likely used on a Delta DC-9 within the 1970s. And what makes it so indestructible is Inconel, a superalloy typically found in furnaces, gas turbine blades, NASCAR exhaust systems, and other XXXtreme heat environments. Flight parameters are engraved onto an Inconel sheet during the trip, ensuring their survival regardless of what.

And for people that wonder why they don’t just make the entire plane out of what the black box is manufactured from: among other things, Inconel’s a very difficult metal to shape and machine and weld and, well, do typically anything with. Basically every little thing that make it so good for survival make it bad for any other practical use. [ Engineering Guy via Presurfer ]

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This post is tagged: bill hammack, commercial airplane, exhaust systems, flight data recorder, flight parameters, heat environments, turbine blades