This little-known inventor has probably saved your life
The headline question being asked by Mr McKay:
David knew his idea for a cockpit recorder was a good one. Without official support, there was little he could do about it – but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.
When his boss was promoted, David pitched his invention again. His new superior was intrigued, and so was Dr Laurie Coombes, ARL’s chief superintendent. They urged him to keep working on it – but discreetly. Since it wasn’t a government-approved venture or a war-winning weapon, it couldn’t be seen to take up lab time or money.
Black box recorder 50/50 break on saving the life of the modal BBC reader?
Think it unlikely, don’t you?
Rebecca, I have told you a million times not to exaggerate.
‘probably saved your life’
Lefties* don’t understand human behavior. Should airplane flights be so dangerous as to kill half the people, few people would fly. People like their butts and won’t do things that will get them killed.
Nor would people spend money on planes, if they were just going to crash.
Seales gives us a half-baked hyperbole cake.
*Writing for BBC is enough evidence to convict her of Leftiism.
I’ve been on a hairyplane six times and none of them crashed, so he never saved my life.
But the boy done well; the boy run hard.
Australia knows no greater praise.
Was an interesting read at least, and he undoubtably saved many lives and helped facilitate international commerce and travel.
“I’ve been on a hairyplane six times and none of them crashed, so he never saved my life.”
Ah but did not the black box from previous crashes lead to changes that prevented your hairyplane from crashing?
One thing I did get out of the article was the BBC being responsible for labelling the orange enclosured flight recorders as “black boxes”. Getting things wrong, even in the fifties..
A friend of mine was an army paratrooper. I was in the air force.
I once told him I couldn’t do that, to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. He retorted that he never rode in a perfectly good airplane.
An improbable rate of air crashes would be required to make this statement correct, a rate which would in fact be impossible as the planes wouldn’t be permitted to fly anywhere.
Or perhaps the writer is a fairly typical middle-class bourgeois type, decrying air travel as evil yet clocking up enough air miles to make their statement plausible, at least for them?
Surely having a black box recorder saves no lives on the aircraft that it is on when it crashes. It may just save some lives in the future if it shows a preventable cause of the crash. So the answer is no, it did not save my life.
We could work this out, we have all the accident reports. Can we search them electronically to find which ones needed data from the Flight Data Recorder to discover the cause of the crash.
Then we just need to see what recommendations were made and acted on, then we can work out the risk averted!
If anyone deserves credit for giving us an airline industry which prides itself on safety and has a culture of open honesty when things go wrong its the early capitalists who wanted to make money.
They knew that to get the public onside they had to change the perception of the industry, which wasn’t good with young men crashing planes all over the place. They actively called for government regulation:
That’s from a PDF you can find by Googling “History of Aviation Safety Oversight in the United States”
Everything else was just building on this culture. There may have been some push back by capitalists when looking at costs, but the culture generally won. Except at Boeing – see the 737 Max debacle.
H/T Tim Newman on the Boeing link.
There is/was a good docu on youtube about David Warren and his endeavours to create the “black box” flight data recorder and for manufacturers/airlines to install them.
In many ways similar to Barnes Wallace, Turing, Whittle etc battle to beat nay-sayers & bureaucrats… Rather like Leave EU