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
Finally a question I can answer. I’ve been an avionics tech for about 10 years.
A Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) are what is commonly revered to as the “black box.” Fun fact, they are in fact not black, but international orange and typically consist of two different systems. One used to record pilot voice and the other used to record aircraft flight surface data.
I am not sure at all where this idea come from that it takes 6 months to “Decode” that data as a recent crash only took us 10 days to decode. Sometimes it can take longer to decode for a few reasons however.
1. It’s destroyed – the CVR and DFDR are in a very tough case we simply call the “Crash Survivable storage unit.” (Real original I know.) Even so, this case may not survive an impact into a mountain. In this unfortunate case we simply may not be able to retrieve the data.
2. It got “lost” – this is pretty typical in underwater scenarios but we have underwater locator beacons that operate at a depth that I cannot disclose. Just know that it’s pretty deep. Sometimes though, it may exceed this depth and it makes it difficult to late.
3. Some maintainer didn’t calibrate the damn thing correctly. – this suck because it’s our own people’s fault that we can’t quickly calculate what happened. People usually go to jail for this stuff though so there is that.
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