In light of the recent plane crash in Pakistan, reports suggest that it will take 6-7 months to decode the black box.
The company that made the black box surely knows how to decrypt their encryption, so why would it take so long?
Also, assuming the encyrption is super-complicated, what sensitive data would warrant such encryption? Is it just voice recordings, or something more?
In: Technology
Hey! I work on this equipment! Here is my input. It doesn’t take this long at all to get the data or even put it into a video format for peoples viewing. This process takes a few weeks from recovery of the black box to someone sitting and seeing a finalized video. A download of the data takes at most 1 hour on most different “black boxes”.
Fun Fact the actual color is “International Orange”. Nothing black about it.
But like others have pointed out, it take awhile to figure out what exactly happened. The public will not see any of the data/video until experts have agreed what happened or at least come up with a finalized report.
Some things in the comments that I feel need to be addressed for correction or clarification is:
Most DFDRs (blackboxes) only record from last power on to last shutdown or a limited amount of time like 12 hours. For crash investigations you typically only need to analyze the last few minutes to see what went wrong. The CVRs (cockpit voice recorders) are usually very limited on recording time(some 4 hours) due to the Pilots Unions because not all of the cockpit lingo needs to be brought up and become public information for privacy reasons. Imagine a pilot who is now dead being heard on takeoff about how he hasn’t gotten laid in weeks from his wife but thank god for his mistress in New York. Unions and crash investigation teams work hand in hand to make sure laws and union agreements are kept in mind.
That movie with Denzel Washington (Flight) shows good examples of Unions being a big part of these investigations. Someone asked the question about the data on the blackbox after normal flights. This is usually just dumped after each flight by the next flight recording over or sometimes frequently downloaded and sent to engineers to analyze the data to make sure the plane is recording this information accurately just in case it does one day crash.
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