INTRODUCTION
On Friday, 19 October 1934, a four engine, twelve passenger de Havilland 86 aircraft took off from Western Junction airport in Launceston, Tasmania at 9am. It was a clear day and the pilots expected the flight from Launceston to Melbourne to be brief and uneventful.
The two experienced pilots were Gilbert Jenkins, who had flown for the Royal Australian Air Force and as a squadron commander for the Canadian Air Force, and Captain V. C. Holyman, the traffic manager of the company that owned and operated the aircraft.
On board were ten Tasmanians: seven men, two women and one child. Among the passengers was a competitive horse rider, a soldier who had served as an ANZAC in WWI, and a preacher.
Now, the preacher was the Reverend Hubert Warren who was on his way to take over St. Thomas’ Church, at Enfield in Sydney. He was travelling alone without his family.
Instead of flying, Mrs. Warren and her four children had opted to take a steamship to Sydney where they planned to be reunited with their husband and father. It was a decision that would significantly impact all their lives.
Around 10:20 am, just under 90 minutes into the flight, the aircraft was approaching the Victorian coast. As it did so it radioed a message to the control tower airport at Laverton. The message was somewhat garbled but appeared to communicate that the plane was on schedule and doing well.
There were several other indicators showing that the plane had flown over Wilsons Promontory, but what happened next still remains a mystery to this day.
The plane never showed up at its destination. When it became apparent that the aircraft, christened Miss Hobart, was overdue, the airline company contacted the Civil Aviation Department requesting their assistance to search for the missing plane.
A Desoutter monoplane was immediately dispatched to search the area surrounding the plane’s last known coordinates, but despite good visibility and clear weather the searchers didn’t find anything.
The search for the plane, its crew and passengers continued over the weekend. Finally, The Civil Aviation Department called off the search on Monday 23 October 1943.
Meanwhile, in Sydney, the family of Reverend Hubert Warren waited anxiously for news. They were shattered with grief when they were told that he was missing and presumed dead.
Hubert Warren’s nine-year-old son David clutched a small crystal radio to his chest when he heard the news of his father’s death. It was the last gift his father had given him and would be treasured by him for many years.
Although the mystery surrounding his father’s death was never fully solved, David Warren went on to make a significant contribution to the field of aviation safety.
During his time as a Principal Research Scientist at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne, David Warren invented the prototype of what we now know as Flight Data Recorders or the Black Box.
Join us as we take a look at the incredible life of David Warren; inventor of the Flight Data Recorder, affectionately known as the Black Box.
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DAVID WARREN
David Warren was born on 20 March 1925 on a remote mission station located on Groote Eylandt, located in the Gulf of Carpentaria and part of the Northern Territory of Australia.
David was the eldest of four children and during his early years the family spent quite a bit of time travelling with their father, Reverend Warren as he worked at various remote missionary outposts. Once while travelling by boat around the Roper River area, near Katherine, David, who was then only a toddler, fell into the river and disappeared under the water.
The parents were frantic. An Aboriginal lady, Isabella Hume, who was travelling with the Warrens immediately jumped into the water to rescue baby David. Being a strong swimmer, she managed to find the infant and bring him back to the boat before he drowned.
Not long after this event, the Warren family were transferred to Launceston, Tasmania, the opposite end of Australia, where David’s father served as a minister at the local Anglican church for a few years.
When David was 8 years old, his father gave him a crystal radio. It quickly became David’s most treasured possession. David spent every minute he could tinkering with the radio, trying to figure out what made it work. After his father’s sudden and untimely death David’s mother stayed in Sydney and enrolled David at Trinity Grammar School.
ENTREPRENEUR AND RESEARCHER
There David, being a budding entrepreneur, capitalised on his friends’ fascination with his crystal radio set and began charging his friends a penny each to listen to cricket matches on his radio. Within a few years he was producing and selling home-made radios for five shillings each.
As a teenager David grew to be a charismatic orator, capable of capturing the attention and imagination of large groups of people. His family had hopes that he would become a preacher like his father, but he was fascinated with electronics and radios.
David Warren was studying for an amateur radio license when World War II broke out. When a ban was placed on hobby radios, he was forced to change his focus and chose chemistry.
He earned a science degree from the University of Sydney, a diploma in education from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in chemistry from the Imperial College in London.
Warren then spent three years at the Woomera Rocket Range, a military and civil aerospace facility in Southern Australia, where he gained a love for rocket science.
After his tenure at the Rocket Range, Warren landed a job as a researcher for the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Fisherman’s Bend, on Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne. The ARL were part of the Australian Defence Department and worked mainly on aircraft design and safety.
AIR CRASH INVESTIGATOR
In 1953, because of his expertise in fuel tank design, Warren was assigned by the ARL to serve on an expert panel investigating the recent de Havilland Comet crashes. Now, this project really appealed to Warren, because you’ll remember [that] his father had died in a de Havilland 86 plane nearly 20 years earlier.
Now the de Havilland Comet was the world’s first commercial jetliner, manufactured by the British aircraft company de Havilland. The first prototype had been tested in 1949, and the aircraft looked promising when it was first launched for service in 1952.
But the elation over the sleek jet liner was short lived. Over the first two years of entering service three de Havilland Comets crashed. What was worse, the highly publicised accidents involved tragic in-flight breakups of the aircraft, causing flaming pieces of debris to fall out of the sky.
The worst of these was the BOAC Flight 783 which crashed in a severe thunderstorm just after taking off from Calcutta in India, killing all 43 people on board. Eyewitnesses later reported seeing the wingless fuselage of the blazing aircraft plunging into a village.
Initial investigations showed that two of the three breakups were a result of structural failure from metal fatigue or significant cracks in the airframe. Though investigators could understand something of what had happened they struggled to understand why.
Then on the 10th January 1954, the British Overseas Airways Corporation or BOAC passenger flight from Singapore to London crashed.
The flight had just taken off on the final leg of its journey from Ciampino Airport in Rome, enroute to Heathrow Airport in London when disaster struck.
It was found that the aircraft experienced an explosive decompression, a term used to describe a sudden and often fatal drop in pressure within a sealed system, in this case the aircraft’s cabin. The explosion sheared the aircraft into pieces, immediately killing all 35 people on board.
PITCHING AN IDEA
Four months after this crash, David Warren submitted a four-page paper pitching the idea for a device that would assist in the investigation into aircraft accidents.
Warren noted the troubling increase in major air disasters in the previous twelve months, and explained how the final minutes before an accident could provide essential data to investigators, which could yield comprehensive answers about what caused the crash.
Now, Warren believed that his proposal was solid but much to his surprise and frustration his superiors hated the suggestion and dismissed it out of hand.
THE INSPIRATION
The inspiration for Warren’s idea came from a device he had seen at a post-World War II trade fair in Sydney. It was a German-engineered recorder called a Minifon which claimed to be the world’s first pocket recorder.
The Minifon was the first portable miniature wire recorder in the world. It was built by a German firm and first introduced in 1951 at a time when transistors were not yet available. The device was battery operated and designed to function as a dictation machine.
It was initially pitched as a great portable dictation machine for businessmen or spies. Businessmen could record letters, memos or notes on the go wherever they were. The dictated content could then be played back and typed out by their secretaries.
As for spies, they could leave the recorder on in their pockets, in order to record sensitive information which could then be sent back to their respective governments. A very useful piece of equipment during the Cold War!
Well, Warren was fascinated by the Minifon and got one for himself, mainly so he could make recordings of his favourite jazz musician Woody Herman. But when he heard one of his colleagues suggesting that the latest Comet crash could have been due to a hijacking, then Warren had an idea.
A SIMPLE QUESTION
Warren asked himself a simple question: what if every plane in the sky had a mini voice recorder in the cockpit? If it was designed to withstand a crash, it could provide invaluable information to forensic investigators trying to make sense of what had happened.
Warren’s bosses however were not interested in the idea. He was told that since it had nothing to do with chemistry or fuels, he was to pass it on to the instruments group and get on with his job as a chemist.
So without official support there was nothing that Warren could do to advance the project, but he refused to be discouraged. He pitched the idea to his new boss Tom Keeble in 1955. Now, Keeble was intrigued by the idea and asked for more information.
THE GREEN LIGHT
Then Keeble gave Warren the green light to pursue his theory discreetly, warning him that since the project wasn’t government approved or involved developing a war-winning weapon it couldn’t be seen to take up the lab’s time or money.
His boss warned him that if he was caught talking to anyone about his project, he would be sacked. A sobering thought for a young man with a wife and two children to support! Nevertheless, his boss quietly backed him by buying a dictation recorder for the lab.
Warren discreetly continued working on ways to test out his theory about the flight recorder. With the help of the Department of Civil Aviation, Warren arranged to get access to some of the fixed microphones in the cockpit of a few aircraft.
He found that a recorder like the Minifon could pick up conversations in a pressurised cabin with about 80 to 100 percent clarity. When Keeble read Warren’s report, he was convinced that the concept could work, and told Warren to put together specifications for a prototype.
A WORKING PROTOTYPE
In 1958, with the help of a Melbourne based instrument maker, Warren soon had the first working prototype of the flight data recorder. It was named the ARL Flight Memory Unit.
The recorder used a 0.05 millimeter-diameter magnetized steel wire to record data and could store up to four hours of voice recording along with various instrument readings such as airspeed, altitude and cabin pressure.
The recorder gathered data at the rate of eight readings per second and continued in a loop erasing all prior information as it recorded new data. The original prototype is now housed in storage at the Museums Victoria Collections.
Unfortunately the response to the prototype was abysmal. Civil aviation authorities in Australia slammed it as having little immediate use in civil aircraft, and the Royal Australian Air Force also decided that such a device wasn’t required.
The worst response of all came from the Federation of Air Pilots, who vehemently declared that they would never fly with such a device in their cockpits, because it was akin to flying with a spy in their midst!
They declared, “No plane will take off in Australia with Big Brother listening!”
This negative response could have spelled the end of the concept for the flight recorder. But Robert Hardingham, the secretary of the UK Air Registration Board saw a prototype on an informal visit to the Aeronautical Research Lab and was immediately impressed.
SECRET MISSION
A few weeks later Warren was on a plane bound for London with strict instructions not to tell the Australian Department of Defence what he was really doing in England, for fear that somebody would disapprove of it.
Ironically, the plane he was flying in lost an engine over the Mediterranean Sea. They had just taken off from Tunisia where it was very hot, and no one wanted to go back to that weather. While Warren wondered aloud if it was prudent to go back, the pilots decided to continue on.
Slightly worried that he mightn’t make it, Warren recorded the rest of the flight thinking that at least if he died, there would be some record of what had taken place in the air. Luckily the flight made it safely to England.
When Warren demonstrated the ARL Flight Memory Unit to the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, the response he received was the opposite of what it had been in Australia.
Both manufacturers and aircraft operators offered their support, and Warren’s device was featured on the BBC evening news and the Radio Newsreel.
THE ‘BLACK BOX’
During one of these interviews a journalist referred to the flight data recorder as a black box and the misnomer stuck. The term, ‘black box’, is actually Royal Air Force slang for electronics equipment. In reality, flight data recorders are either bright red or orange to help locate them during crash recovery.
After the success in Britain, when Warren returned to Australia the ARL assigned him a small team to update the initial recording prototype to a pre-production standard.
The team increased the recording rate from 8 to 24 readings of data per second from the cockpit instruments and added on the capability of continual recording even after the aircraft lost electrical power.
Unfortunately the recording device produced by Warren and his team at the ARL was never patented and never even went into production. Instead, the British company S. Davall and Sons asked the ARL for manufacturing rights to the device.
They were granted the rights and their version of the flight data recorder went on to secure a large share of the flight data recording market.
A LIFE SAVER
In 1960 Australia led the way by becoming the first country in the world to make cockpit flight and data recorders mandatory. The ruling was handed down by a judicial inquiry into one of the worst civil aviation disasters in Australia.
The Trans Australian Airlines, or TAA, Flight 538, a Fokker Friendship passenger aircraft, was on approach to land at Mackay airport in Queensland when it crashed into the ocean killing all 29 passengers on board. The cause of the accident remains a mystery to this day.
Later the United States and the United Kingdom began to pass their own black box rules. The UK mandated them in 1965 and the US in 1967.
Today black boxes are fireproof, ocean-proof and encased in steel for good measure. They are also compulsory on every commercial flight and the bright orange boxes are often located behind the cockpit on many flights.
For almost 50 years, Warren’s pioneering work on the black box was virtually unrecognised until in 1999, he was awarded the Australian Institute Energy Medal and then in 2002 was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in recognition of his service to the aviation industry.
In 2008 Qantas paid tribute to David Warren by naming one of its Airbus A380 aircraft after him. Sadly, David Warren didn’t receive a single cent in royalties from his ground-breaking invention.
He died in Brighton, Melbourne in 2010 at the age of 85. His casket bore an orange sticker similar to those placed on the side of modern flight data recorders. It read ‘Flight Recorder Inventor. Do Not Open.’
The black box has been responsible for improving the safety of aviation and saving countless lives. This is because every time a crash does occur the data recorded on the black box contributes towards not only understanding what happened but also why it happened.
Understanding why aviation accidents take place helps airlines, manufacturers and air traffic controllers to make better choices in the future and implement measures that ensure the safety of passengers in the air.
SHINING A LIGHT
In essence the black box shines a light on the past and helps us to understand it so that we can make improvements for the future. The black box is a lot like God’s Word – it shines a light on the past and helps us have hope for the future.
Psalms 119:105 says “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” The Bible offers us guidance as we journey through life. The Bible is a light that can bring hope even in the darkest night of despair.
Life is filled with problems, pitfalls and perils. Unforeseen circumstances often take us by surprise, leaving us floundering in confusion and hopelessness but the Bible assures us that God is in control of both the past, the present and the future.
Isaiah 46:8-10 says,
“Remember this and be assured….for I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is no one like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things which have not been done…”
God sees and understands the pain and trials in our past and he has the answers we need to navigate them in the present so that we can have hope for peace and healing in the future. Much like the flight data recorder, God’s word has recorded the events of the past to help us make better sense of what lies in the future.
Through stories and prophecies the Bible sheds light on how to cope with our personal circumstances and to understand the great events happening in the world around us. It gives us the assurance that God’s hand is over all, working everything out for good.
More than any other book in human history, the Bible has the power to transform lives. It is not merely a good self-help book, giving us tips on how to improve our lives and make healthier decisions. The Bible is so much more than that.
The word of God can help us understand our thoughts and feelings, the hidden motives of our heart that spur us to action; but more than that the word of God is able to give us the power we need to change thoughts and motives that might be toxic or harmful to our well-being.
God’s word can shine light into the dark corners of our minds that might be plagued with depression and anxiety, to give us hope where there is despair, and a renewed sense of purpose where there is aimlessness.
Now, while the black box only imparts data that helps forensic investigators to understand what happened and why, the Bible goes a step further. Not only does Scripture help us to understand the world around us and the causes for the destruction, desolation and despair we see, it is also able to give us power.
SPECIAL OFFER AND CLOSING PRAYER
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If you’ve enjoyed our journey with David Warren and the invention of the black box that helped to increase safety measures in aircraft; and our reflections on how the Bible is a guidebook for our lives, then be sure to join us again next week, when we will share another of life’s journeys together. Until then, let’s pray to the great God, who is our God and our guide.
Dear Heavenly Father. We thank you for your word, the Bible, that gives us hope and guidance and direction to our lives. The Bible lights our pathway through life, and shows us the right way to go. Father, may we not neglect your word, the Bible. Please continue to bless and guide our lives. We ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
