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It has an American unit on show.
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It doesn’t mention the country which – this country – which first made it mandatory.
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It doesn’t mention, uhm, the country that first flew one in the air, which is this one.
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It doesn’t mention the push we had for 14 years to get the Americans even to recognize the value of it. …
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Dr. David Warren, lamenting about the failure of Washington Smithsonian Institute to recognize an Australian invention.
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And this is it: The world’s first flight recorder, or “Blackbox”,
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which he and his friends developed in the 1950s and 60s.
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Ironically, it was the failure of another world first,
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the first civilian jet called the Comet, that inspired the Warren idea.
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Warren wasn’t an electronics specialist, but rather a fuels expert with the Aeronautical Research Laboratories.
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He sat on a committee considering the Comet’s problems.
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I kept thinking to myself:
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“If it were a pilot error, or if it were something which were known to the crew,
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they may have said something or done something.
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If we only could recapture those last few seconds,
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it’d all save this argument and uncertainty, we’d know what it was.”
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Somebody may have known.
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And I had been, just the week before, to an instrument exhibition and seen this.
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Now this is the world’s first pocket recorder if you like:
And I had been, just the week before, to an instrument exhibition and seen this.
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Now this is the world’s first pocket recorder if you like:
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The Minifon.
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A German unit, which records on about two or three miles of very fine wire as thick as your hair…
The Minifon.
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A German unit, which records on about two or three miles of very fine wire as thick as your hair…
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Inspiration is one thing, but selling an idea is quite another.
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At first, if it was to try and get the Australian authorities on your side,
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and so you write them a letter.
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And their reply was, uh, to go and send us:
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3 pages what was required, then, in aircraft – as if we weren’t quite sure –
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and then the statement:
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And, say, you see, Dr. Warren’s invention has “no immediate significance” in civil aviation. …
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Eventually, it was the British and Americans who manufactured and refined
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what is now standard equipment on all commercial aircraft.
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The flight recorder experience was incredible enough.
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But it wasn’t the only one of Dr. Warren’s ideas to be met with bureaucratic indifference.
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This prototype of a crash beacon recorder has done little more than gather dust since its invention in 1960.
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The beacon, or “Plastic mushroom”, was a joint Australian-Canadian development,
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which aimed to reduce the likelihood of destruction of the flight recorder and lead to its instant retrieval.
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Rather than have your crash recorder buried at the bottom,
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we said there’s an another alternative.
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We can always have a crash recorder inside the plane
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where we can get at it easily to see what’s happened in the last flight,
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or we can put it in the tail where it’s most likely to survive in an impact.
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Or we could build it onto the back in one of these, so that when it flips off,
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even if the plane is lost and even every survivor is lost,
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the radio says: “Come and get me immediately.”
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And when you do get there,
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the little spools, which have all the information we need,
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are actually housed in this beacon.
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We couldn’t carry the whole recorder, it’s too heavy,
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but by making the spools detachable…
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We worked with the Canadians and we were able to make this combination
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which can be retrieved and say “you got the data even if you haven’t got the aircraft.”
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How can this sort of thing help in modern day air crashes, for instance the Air India tragedy?
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Had there been one on the Air India plane,
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search aircraft could’ve been there within, say, half an hour,
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because the mayday signal, the distress signal, is monitored all the time in various parts of the world.
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And as soon as captured you could set out as quick as you can start your motors.
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Had there’d been survivors, had their pilot been in the vicinity and still floating, we might have rescued him.
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If, the ex… the popular theory seems to be that the Jumbo Jet, the Air India Jumbo jet exploded,
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because there was a bomb on board, now if that happens, what’s to say that something like this mushroom wouldn’t go up with it?
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Uh, it could have been, if the bomb had been underneath,
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it might have destroyed the mushroom on the outside.
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I think, more likely, it would have blown it with a… the support of the structure underneath,
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blown it clear, it it still would’ve landed in the water.
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It may have been destroyed, but that’s a fairly remote chance compared with something locked in the aircraft over 2,000 feet of water.
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So, some 30 years on, it’s no consolation to David Warren to know
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that bureaucratic stonewalling caused all his hard work to be lost to Australia.
