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

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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

20 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

No expert, but decode in this sense doesn’t mean it’s encrypted for security reasons and they’re thinking “oh shit, we forgot the password” it’s more to do with the complexity of the task at hand.

It is also extremely important to make sure all the data is correct and none of it is corrupted (bear in mind, this box went through a hell of an impact) and if something is reading the wrong figure, it could screw up the whole investigation. So they have to error check and back up (safely) millions of lines of code reporting everything that happened, from thousands of sensors, millisecond by millisecond. Not an easy task.

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