A Boeing 737-800 carrying 123 passengers and 9 crew members recently crashed in South China, killing all 132 people, as per local Chinese media reports. Authorities have now found one of the black boxes from the China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed into a mountainside on Monday. An official at China's aviation regulator said that the black box that was found was "severely damaged", and they were unsure if it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder at this stage.

A black box is a combination of flight data recorder that records the altitude, speed among other pertinent details and a cockpit voice recorder that records the conversation among pilots. Data from these black boxes reveal the reason behind a crash. Both of the jet's black boxes were manufactured by Honeywell, the official said, without naming the models. This is how the black box readout process works-

What are black boxes?

Contrary to the name, the boxes are not actually black, but high-visibility orange. Experts disagree with how the nickname originated, but it has become synonymous with the quest for the answers when planes crash. Many historians attribute their invention to Australian scientist David Warren in the 1950s. They are mandatory. The aim is not to establish legal liability, but to identify causes and help prevent accidents.

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How have they evolved?

The earliest devices recorded limited data on wire or foil. Modern ones use solid-state memory. The recordings are housed inside crash-survivable containers able to withstand 3,400 times the force of gravity on impact. Both black box recordings were recovered from an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash in March 2019 that, like the China Eastern plane, dove into the ground at a very high velocity.

How big are they?

The black box generally weighs about 10 pounds (4.5 kg) and contain four main parts, namely: a chassis or interface designed to secure the device and facilitate recording and playback, an underwater locator beacon, the core housing or "Crash-Survivable Memory Unit" made of stainless steel or titanium and inside there, the recordings on chips or older formats.

There are two recorders: a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) for pilot voices and cockpit sounds and a flight data recorder (FDR) that captures information on parameters including altitude, airspeed, heading and engine thrust.

How will the recorders be handled?

Technicians peel away protective material and carefully clean connections to make sure they do not accidentally erase data. The audio or data file must be downloaded and copied.
The data itself means nothing at first. It must be decoded from raw files before being turned into graphs.

Investigators sometimes use "spectral analysis" - a way of examining sounds that allow scientists to pick out barely audible alarms or the first fleeting crack of an explosion.

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How much information is available?

It will depend on the exact models of the Honeywell recorders, which has not been disclosed. An Air India Express 737-800 with two Honeywell black boxes that crashed in 2020 after overshooting a runway in heavy rain had a CVR capable of 120 minutes of digital audio, according to a final report into the crash. That would be more than enough to cover the 66-minute China Eastern flight. The FDR on the Air India Express plane recorded about 25 hours of flight data.

Where will the data be read?

Chinese officials have not disclosed where they plan to read the black boxes. In crash investigations, they are typically read domestically if the technology is available. If recorders are badly damaged, the operation is occasionally delegated to an overseas agency like France`s BEA or the device`s manufacturer.

How long will the results take?

Chinese authorities have not specified. That will depend in part on the condition of the recordings and where they are read. Interim reports are published after a month, but are often sparse. Deeper investigations take a year or more to complete. Experts say air accidents are usually caused by a cocktail of factors.

With inputs from Reuters

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