Why does it take half a year to decode an airplane’s black box?

Question

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

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, the analysis is the long part. But ensuring integrity of the data is a huge challenge as well. Plane crashes are violent affairs, and getting to the storage media, and getting the data off in a safe way is a forensics and computing nightmare.