Why is a whole plane not made out of a black box durability?
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i‘m no expert, and not native to english, but let me try:
If something is small and very compact it can withstand high stress, like if you try to stay on a Lego brick. But now you want to make the brick bigger and hollow, because you want to have people and chairs in there, also you want to reduce weight so you can actually fly. So you take your Lego and you build a hollow cube and put a few toys in.
Let both drop – what will shatter, the small Lego brick or your hollow cube?
Also, weight…. planes are made to be as light as possible so they can lift off the ground. Backbones are small but heavily armoured boxed. If the plane was made out of it, the dam thing would be too heavy to take off.
Deceleration is an issue.
What is deceleration? It’s a change in speed. Imagine that you’re in a car, the brakes are applied. If they’re barely touched, you will not notice it. If the brakes get applied harder, you feel pushed into your seatbelt (you are wearing a seatbelt, right?).
Hit the brakes **hard** and you’ll be pushed painfully into the seatbelt – you’re experiencing a strong deceleration.
Why does this matter for a black box? As it hits the ground during a crash, it decelerates hard – in a fraction of a second it goes from several hundred kilometers per hour, to zero. It’s like being in a car when the brakes are hit hard – but a hundred times worse.
It does not matter for a black box as the contents are mostly electronics, so they can stand up to that violent abuse. However – human beings (and animals in general) cannot decelerate like that – our organs would turn to mush. So the black box would be intact, but the humans inside would be dead.
Because that would make planes far too heavy to fly, and it wouldn’t even be of a particular benefit.
When your plane crashes into the ground at several thousand feet per minute decent rate, it doesn’t really matter if the plane breaks or not. Because regardless how strong the plane is, your body and organs can’t withstand that sort of impact anyway.
The materials and protections required to make each black box capable of withstanding a crash are both very heavy and very expensive. A plane made like a black box will be far too heavy to fly. It’ll be so heavy that we would have to re-invent wheels (literally), runways, engines, wing designs, etc. This weight would also make it require impractical amounts of fuel per flight.
Planes need to be strong but light enough to fly. If you tried to make a plane strong enough that it would not break upon crashing, that plane would likely be too heavy to fly, or too expensive to ever build and operate.
Also, just because the aircraft survives, that doesn’t mean the people inside do too. You’re still crashing into the ground at speed. What you’d need in that scenario is something to cushion the blow (like a giant airbag), or better yet, something to slow down your fall so that you hit the ground at a slower speed (this is what a parachute does, for instance). Making the plane itself stronger doesn’t help with that.
Ultimately, the best thing you can do to make an aircraft safer is to prevent it from crashing in the first place, and that is exactly what the industry and regulators focus on.
Because it would weigh too much.
And also, what would be the benefit? The plane collides with something but stays intact, but how does that help crew or passengers? The impact forces from a plane that stays intact in a collision, would generally kill everyone.
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