March 13, 2014 • 35 mins
Black boxes are designed to be the only survivor of plane crashes so they can live to tell the tale of what went wrong to prevent future accidents. Learn about how these grim devices are made, how they're tested and the tales they've told.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark and they're sitting by me. Is Chuck Bryant
across from you and Jerry Rowland beside us. Here we are, Yeah,
(00:23):
this is stuff. Hey, and this is a fan request
by one of our younger fans. Yeah. When Cormack ron Dalzo,
it's right, our buddy, Joe's son and wife Cat, they
all listen as a family and it's adorable. They shout
at their stereo as a family. Yeah, apparently Cat shouted
(00:44):
at the stereo when you didn't remember thirteen year old
girls doing finger spelling sign language, Joe said. Kat was like,
how can he not have known this? That's all we did.
It wasn't around Tolito. Yeah, and you know what, Emily
didn't know about it either, and she was in Ohio,
so maybe it's everywhere but Ohio, Ohio. Colon left behind
(01:04):
as usual. It's pretty funny. But yeah, Cormack suggested that
we do an episode on black box flight recorders, and
that's what we're doing. Yeah, So Chuck, if you'll indulge
me before we get started. Um, I don't know if
you remember, but a couple of years ago a fan
sent in some day planners for us UM that were
(01:26):
like year long day planners, the the ones made out
of old library books. Yeah, and like um and they
had like h like de coupage like clicker stuff on
the on the cover. They were great. Perfect. Can't find
anything even remotely that good anywhere I've been looking for
a while. So, dear listener, if you're still out there
(01:48):
and you were listening UM, get in touch with us,
because I would love to buy those from you every year.
Oh yeah, you like those? Oh they were great? Yeah? Yeah,
you mean went crazy for it. Yeah, So if you
are that person, get in touch with us. Yeah. Stuff
podcast at Discovery dot com and put in the subject
line I'm the person Josh is looking for our day planners.
(02:11):
Uh okay, thank you, Chuck. So we're talking black boxes,
that's right, it's pretty interesting. I thought, Yeah, we should
probably put to rest the inane question of if they
can make something like a black box that can survive
an airplane car crash, why don't you just make the
whole airplane out of a black box material? And the
answer is because it wouldn't fly. Simple as that. Yeah,
(02:35):
so I'm glad we got that out of the way. Yeah,
and they're also we should go ahead and say right
up front, they're not black. Uh. They're generally like bright
orange with like reflective tape and things, because you want
to be able to find it. Yeah, amongst the rubble
as of the I think the sixties or seventies, there
became a mandate where you had to paint them bright
orange so you could find them. But they think that
(02:55):
they were called black boxes originally because either the original
ones were blacky or because it was kind of a
grim moniker because the boxes will become charred in the
wreckage and turn black. Yeah. I saw another explanation to that,
I don't think holds water. That they were initially like
round and red, and when they first debuted it, someone
(03:17):
in the room said, oh, what a nice black box,
as a smarmie thing to say, I guess about something
that's round and red. I don't know if that holds
water though. Yeah. It's weird all around. And apparently in
the aviation industry they don't call them black boxes anyway.
That's like something for the news media and jerks like us,
they probably call them crash survivalbal memory units. I think
(03:38):
what they call them is either one of the two
things that are either a flight data recorder or a
voice box. Well, there's a there's a lot of um. Yeah,
it's not that hard. But because of the media, and
in part because of this article, uh, it's very unclear
that black boxes are different things. Yeah, there's two different
(04:03):
We'll get into it, but there's really two different kinds.
And what you would think of as a black box
is actually a group of components the system that yeah,
that formed this system that's meant to record the flight
data and the cockpit um sounds, which is the discussion
and the beeps and the pings and all that of
(04:25):
every single flight that goes into the air, commercial flight yeah, um,
in order, and then it is housed in a way
that it will survive even a horrible plane crash. It's
frequently the only survivor of a plane crash. Yeah. And
we'll get to the testing of these, which I thought
was kind of the coolest part. Yeah, I thought so too.
And the whole point is, of course, is to get
(04:46):
all the data to figure out what happened in a
plane crash, what happened because very frequently that it's not. Again,
if it's the sole survivor, then there's no one there
to say, oh, well there's fire. There there's fire. It's
somebody lit a fire in the cabin and and the
whole the plain blue wall. Yeah, but you could hit
play and the pilot's going someone lit a fire in
(05:07):
the cabin, and there you have it. But it's a
little more complicated than that. Uh and goes back to uh.
In the nineteen forties there was a Finish aviation engineer
named V. A. Ho which doesn't sound finish umigration and
he did some of the first um flight recording was
(05:30):
something called the Mata Harre for World War two planes
test flights basically, but I think it was only like
instrument readings at the time. It wasn't recording uh uh
any voices like cockpit recording. Well, supposedly the Right Brothers
had some sort of recording device to record the propeller rotation.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's like there's been flight data
(05:50):
ever since there's been flight that's awesome. I found that
an Australian named David Warren was the one who really
came up with the black box recorder. Yeah, he's the
one that brought the voices into it, the actual audio recording. Okay, Yeah,
he was He was a member of a crash investigation
for a mysterious plane crash, and he thought it would
be really good if we had like a recording of
(06:11):
what was going on at the time. So he developed them. Yeah,
he's like that, you couldn't be too hard. And that
was the fifties, I believe, and they became widespread and
mandated in the sixties in Australia. It was the first
country and I guess even continent to make the mandatory.
So go uh Ozzy Yazzy Azzi so um. Initially the
(06:34):
black box recorders were UM recording on magnetic tape, and
then they moved in the strangely enough, in the late
nineties early two thousands. It wasn't until UM two eight
that they fully switched. Yeah that the f A mandated
in two thous five. There was a list of proposed
rules and one of them was, let's get rid of
(06:56):
magnetic recorders, which no one uses anymore. That's two thousand
five after all, and go to solid state digital record
yeah right, Uh, no cassettes even UM and uh they
the f A thought about it, and thought about and
thought about and finally said, okay, fine, we'll do that.
One of the big reasons why it was with magnetic
(07:16):
tapes you could just record the last half hour of
a cockpit conversation. Yeah, it would. It would rerecord over
itself every thirty minutes, which you know probably that's all
you need. Yeah, you want to hope that your plane
doesn't take thirty minutes to go down. Um. But the
the the big superiority that solid state has over that
(07:39):
is that the recording time is far greater, the recording
media is smaller, more durable if you were moving parts, yeah,
and so it can't break down as easily. And if
one part breaks, you can still take the solid state
memory sticks and reconfigure them and get the eat off
(08:00):
of them. Still. Yeah. They cost between ten and fifteen
grand each and are usually um comes straight from the manufacturer,
like they work with the airline manufact airplane manufacturers themselves
to like preinstall them on these planes. Right. Yeah, So
you have a black box manufacturer who sells them to
the airlines, who are the airplane manufacturers who sell the
(08:22):
airplanes to the airlines with the black boxes are installed.
It's like a part of the plane. That's right. Um,
so we should probably explain this now it's been long enough.
A black box can be one of two things, well,
one of three things really. Um. It can be the
flight data recorder, or it can be the cockpit voice recorder,
(08:44):
that's right, or it can be the crash survival baluh
memory unit. Black box refers to all three of those. Yeah,
the important thing, the only thing that really needs to
survive the crash is the crash survival of memory. That's
where the data is it and housed and um that's
the one that's super super beefed up to survive like
(09:07):
a nuclear war. Basically, so on any flight, on any
commercial flight, you have hundreds, if not thousands of sensors
going on at all times, and they are measuring things
like airspeed, altitude, UH, cabin pressure, cabin temperature, UM, wing
trim everything, What are your flaps doing? Yaw? Yeah, you
(09:32):
don't just guess it, yaw, you gotta measure it right, right,
And so all of this information is coming into the
flight computer and plugged into the flight computer is uh. Well,
basically it's like an upstream passive eavesdropping units called the
Flight Data Acquisition Unit, and it takes all of this UM.
That's up front, right, that's up front with the pilots UM,
(09:53):
and it takes all of this incoming information and it
records it. So not only is the are the pilots
and the the ground control getting all this information, but
it's being recorded as well, UM and it's being routed
to the recorders through the Flight Data Acquisition Unit. Right.
So also up front in the cockpit you're gonna have
at least four microphones and in some newer planes also
(10:16):
video cameras. Yeah, that's the newest, the latest, crazy, right,
which you can't do that on magnetic tape, you know
what I'm saying. Yeah, they have to start drinking vodka
instead of like brown liquors. What do you mean the pilots,
you know, like it's water. I'm just having some h
dwoh not not the Great Goose or Yeah, I'm joking. Okay,
(10:38):
all the pilots have been known to drink here and
there and they get in trouble. Yeah, they should get
in big trouble for you're the d D. Okay, if
you're an airline pilot, there's no way around it. The
only shouldn't do is drink and do drugs. So um,
up there to eaves drop on the pilots, and not
just the pilots, but also all the sounds going on
in the cockpit. Are these microphones and their recording everything
(11:00):
through the cockpit voice recorder? Yeah, and you talked about
the sounds, that's a big deal. Like not only do
you want to hear Captain Jim say, holy crap, our
wing is on fire, but they want to hear thirty
seconds before that if they hear just some weird noise.
And they're trained to pick up all that ambiance sound
and experts or trained too to listen out for things
(11:22):
that you would probably never notice. It's just a regular dude,
right exactly. And they can sit there and hear a
ping or a thud or a knock or a combination
of those things and be like, oh, I know what happened.
Somebody smoked in the laboratory and while they were on
their cell phone is loaded. Um, so you've got again,
you've got the cockpit voice recorder, you've got the flight
(11:42):
data recorder, and all of that info going out to
those two guys is going through the flight data Acquisition unit.
And it's sending the info all the way to the
back of the plane, where the cockpit voice recorder and
the flight data recorder are located. And why is it
located in the back, because the front of the plane
takes up most of the force of the impact, and
(12:03):
it's far likelier that something placed at the rear of
the plane, specifically like the tail cone or the aft
galley ceiling or something way in the back is going
to be likelier to survive because the rest gets mushed. Yeah,
we talked about that in our Surviving a Plane Crash episode.
And while they won't come out and say it out right,
(12:23):
it is a little bit safer in the back of
an airplane because you usually go nose down, and by
all accounts, if you drive a plane into a mountain,
captain and the co pilot are going to suffer the
worst of it. Maybe if you're in the back bathroom
having your cigarette, you're shaving like on airplane, you might
have a chance to survive, like cutting themselves. Uh and
(12:47):
speaking of mountains, chuck, this is good at places I
need to put it. There's some something called plane Crash
info dot com slash last words, and there's a lot
of It's not just this site. There's a lot of
sites that have UM recordings from black boxes from like
the last seconds or whatever. And this site also has
(13:07):
just like transcriptions of the last couple of sentences, and
one of them was mountains the last thing. But then
there's been there's other ones to like, um Ma, I
love you was one the last words of one pilot.
Another one was Pete sorry, so I get somebody screwed up.
Another one was hang on, what the hell is this? Yeah,
(13:30):
and then other ones seem like they don't realize what's
about to happen. This isn't as bad as I thought
it would be, right, Yeah, yeah, but it's pretty interesting stuff.
Some of it's pretty grim. Some of it's super sad. Yeah,
it's like not an uplifting thing. Start on read on
a Friday afternoon. Oh no, it's not uplifting, but it's
it's definitely interesting. Yeah. I would not recommend reading that
(13:50):
before you take a flight. No. As a matter of fact,
Umi was traveling UM recently while I was researching this,
and I made you send it to I was like,
I can't send her this. He's gotta fly back here.
That's awful. UM. Alright, so we talked, Uh, let's go
ahead and talk about the flight the flight data recorder. UM.
You mentioned that they are all kinds of um of
(14:13):
data being recorded, like up to seven hundred types of
data can be recorded. UM. Like they can tell when
you just turn a switch on, that's like it's logged.
All of a sudden, captain turned on, even interior cabin
light switch, you know, that's all recorded. And UM. The
f a A they require pre two thousand two planes
(14:34):
to have a minimum of eleven and twenty parameters. If
it was built after two thousand to um at least
eight parameters, right, I don't see why they just don't
log at all if they can. Well, apparently like that
that rule that forced up to eight parameters be recorded
like cost the airline industry like three million bucks or something.
(14:54):
And that's the reason they're notoriously tight. So that's why
they keep fighting it. And it's the NTSB that's say like,
let's push this along. It's two thousand five, we need
to stop using magnetic reel reel and the f a
A is like, I don't know, Well, the f A
is being pushed around by the airline industry well scary enough. Um,
I guess it's a good time to mention this. There
(15:14):
was something called the Safe Act Safe A v S
Asian and Flight Enhancement Act, and it's been up twice
and has not passed this legislation either time. And all
they're trying to do is provide a second recorder and
one of them should be deployable in the rear, which
makes sense, like if the plane hits an impact, this
(15:36):
thing pops off the back of the plane altogether and
a little clost like. I guess so because because they said, uh,
the f a A has a long history of delaying uh,
much needed upgrades in this equipment, and I guess it's
because the price or the airplane lobby. Yeah. When you
(15:57):
when your federal agency is actually like a safeguard to
protect the finances of the industry, is regulating, that's not good. No,
it's not. I can't everybody just do things right. I know,
it's frustrating, and money is typically at the root of
it all, you know, it always is. Yeah, all right,
So we talked a little bit about the testing. I
(16:20):
guess we should just talk about what these things are
built out of, why they survive that the CSMU back
in Roswell in New Mexico. No, but there are three
layers of materials to keep these things safe. Um, you
got your aluminum housing on the outside of it, and
it holds all your memory cards. No, the aluminum is inside.
(16:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, that makes sense. It's
the weakest link, you know what I mean, it's on
the inside surrounding it's the last stand of protection. I guess, right,
that is like you said, it's holding the memory cards,
which are the one thing you really want to survive,
the only thing. And this is right right, Yeah, I
guess it's a good point. And this is the crash
(17:03):
survivable memory Unit, which is actually a part of the
flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. But it's
also the separate It's kind of like the Holy see no,
the Holy of Holies, the temple within the Temple of Jerusalem. Yeah,
like everything else will get mangled and it doesn't matter.
(17:23):
But all you needed, like you said, are those memory cards. Right, Okay,
So so go ahead. There's an aluminum housing around the
memory card, right, and then around that you have it
insulated with a dry silica one inch of it and
that is because a lot of times some planes crash
they catch on fire. Yeah, you want to retard fire.
Put a niche of silicus stuff around this, around whatever
(17:44):
you want, your hand, your head, sure, just do it.
You won't get h And then around that is your
outer shell. And it's either stainless steel or titanium. It's
about a quarter inch thick. And that's like you know
that you're bomb casing and all of that is why
you can't bill a plane out of all this. It
would be too heavy. And so this this one to
(18:05):
three punch of a crash revivable memory unit. Um, it's
a cylinder. Did you say that? I thought it was implicit.
It's just so imagine like a steel box. And you
can also go onto how stuff works and type in um,
how black boxes working. It'll bring up images. But imagine
like a steel box that forms like an L on
(18:26):
its back right, so the foot is sticking upward into
the air. And then on the part that's along the
ground now of the L is it's cylinder that's coming up.
Looks like it's it's holding some oil or something like.
That's an oil cylinder. It's like a fat squat barrel.
Then Attached to that is this little tube another cylinder
(18:49):
but longer and shorter, that serves as the handle for
the whole unit. But it's also a beacon. Yeah, and
that's super important. Um And actually we'll get into that.
But you've got to find these things, you know. It
does no good if it's hidden behind a tree or
at the bottom of the ocean. They like to hide,
they do. So we talked about some of the testing
(19:11):
that these things go through, and it's pretty awesome. Um.
They do one, two, three, four, five, six tests, the
first of which is just a basic crash impact. They
shoot it out of an air cannon at thirty four
hundred g s into an aluminum honeycomb and it smashes
(19:31):
it with a force equal to times its own weight.
It's just like, I want to see this thing in
super SlowMo basically, which not only does this simulate the
impact of a major plane crash, it actually probably overstates
the force. I think they overstate everything, you know, and
these things survived to say, okay, good, all right, let's
(19:52):
take it on to the next test, and the flight
data recorders like wait what yeah, exactly, and they take
it onto the pin drop, which I think it's funny
that they the pin drop has nothing to do with it. Sound,
it's like engineering humor. Yeah. They take like a five
pound weight with a quarter inch steel pin coming out
of the end of it. It's like a little spike,
(20:12):
and they drop it from ten ft the spike onto
the weakest axis of the uh, the black box. It's
like a puncture test. Yeah, and it nothing happens, so
they move it on to the next test. Yeah. The
static crush, which would be a good band name. Uh.
Five minutes of five thousand pounds per square much pressure
(20:34):
applied to the six major access points. So it's just
a constant, not an impact thing. But just let me
see if I can just crush you over time with
brute force. Yeah. It's like a headlock. Yeah, the worst
headlock you can ever imagine. And then the fire test,
which uh they fire a propane fireball with three burners
at about two thousand degrees fahrenheit for an hour and
(20:57):
just let it sit there and see if it melts
or does anything or explodes or whatever. Yea, it just
sits there. Um, and then the planes frequently go down.
Well when they go down, they frequently go down into
the ocean or the sea. So your black box has
to survive underwater. So they do a deep sea immersion
test UM, which is like a pressurized tank of water
(21:19):
for twenty four hours. Uh. And then they also do
a saltwater submersion test, so this thing has to basically
sit around in saltwater for thirty days, that's right. And
finally they will let it soak in other types of
fluids like jet fuel and lubricants and fire extinguisher chemicals
and anything else in a plane that it might end
(21:40):
up submerged in. And if they can withstand sitting in
jet fuel for a period of time, then you're good
to go. Yeah. And then after all this they put
a little um mortarboard on the the cylinder and send
it along its way to be installed in an airplane.
That's right where it's Sadly, we'll only be used if
(22:00):
something really bad happens. Alright, So we've set this all up.
These things are sturdy, they're solid, they're good to go. Uh.
I think we should talk about what happens in the
event of a crash right after this place. All right,
So your plane is crashed, Yeah, we're both dead, but
(22:21):
the black box has survived. It lives on what happens
to it. Well, they have to find it first. Um And,
like we said, these things are tested to make sure
that they can withstand deep sea and salt water immersion,
which they sometimes have to. UM And in the event
that they are going to go into the water. The
little handle that has an underwater beacon installed in it
(22:45):
actually has this water detector and when water comes in
contact with the beacon, it starts to set it off
and it sends out a pink I think every minute
or thirty seconds for the next thirty days or something like. Yeah,
it's one per second for a month. Yeah. Um. And
this ping you couldn't hear it if you were listening
for it, but if you were listening through sonar, you
(23:07):
would be able to pick it up. And the beacon
sends out the ping and the people go find the
ping and they get it. They can transmit ideally, but
it can transmit up to fourteen thou feet, which is
pretty impressive, right, um And and if you can find
the beacon thanks to the ping, that's awesome. There have
(23:28):
been cases where the black boxes have been found long
after the ping stopped. Um Air France flight four or
four seven when I think two thousand nine and went
down in the Atlantic, remember that one. It was awful,
like it just disappeared into the Atlantic and they couldn't
find the wreckage for a very long time. I tried
to block out plane crashes. It was. It was a
(23:50):
bad one. It was one of the worst, most recent ones. Um.
But they couldn't find the black box for two years,
and they finally found it in sea water at twelve
thou feet after two years. And when they brought the
both of the black boxes up, they were able to
get all of the data off of them. They were
well made. Did it was it dumb luck or were
(24:11):
they searching for it? Oh? They're searching for it, Okay,
even though it stopp pinging, they just kept looking. Uh.
So you do recover it, hopefully, and then you need
to analyze the data. So they're going to transport it
to the h to a lab at the NTSP the
National Transportation Safety Board. We should say, the the country
(24:33):
that this happens in, or if it's like an international
waters the country that the airline is registered in is
responsible for leading the investigation. So in the United States
would be the NTSB. Okay, yeah, sure. Um. And just
like any relic you find, if you know about finding
undersea items that have been in salt water, you want
(24:55):
to transport that in its own state that you found it,
so in its own yeah, like if it's it's the
same thing as if you find a piece of sunken treasure.
You don't want to bring it out and dry it
off with a hair dryer. You want to keep it
submerged in saltwater because that's where it's been living. And
that's the sucking treasure pro tip from Chuck. I did
an article on that. Actually that's how I know this. Um.
(25:18):
But yeah, so if if they find it in the ocean,
they want to transport it in salt water and a
cooler to a lab where they can really treat it right,
give it the V I P treatment. Yeah. Um. And
if the whole black box is still intact, yeah, you
can actually just use it's it's computer interface. It's already
installed this part of the recorder. Yeah, you can just
(25:39):
plug it in and download all the stuff off of it. Yeah,
it can be super quick. But oftentimes that stuff, like
we said, is mangled and burned away, and so you
have to just take the memory sticks and then you know,
hook it up to a different machine so you can
retrieve the data, that's right, which takes a little longer. Yeah,
it can take weeks or months. When you get the data. Obviously,
(25:59):
when you have the flight data recorder data, you can
feed that into a computer and create a simulation using
a model to visualize what the plane was doing based
on all those readings from all those different arrays. When
you put them all together, it can create a computer
model of the plane to show what it was doing
at the time of the crash. Um, the cockpit voice
(26:22):
recorder uses a little more of human ingenuity to piece
it together, and this takes way longer. Yeah. One thing
you're gonna have is um a representative from the airline.
You're gonna have a representative from the plane builder because
they don't like their planes to go down. Um, there's
gonna be uh, I guess whatever country or in your
(26:44):
version of the NTSB is going to be there. And
then sometimes they might have a translator or language specialist,
depending on you know what nationality your your pilot was,
because i'mout to translate some stuff and you have people
who are trained in deciphering beeps and pings and Knox
and airline cockpits, and they put all this together. It's
a pretty interesting job, you know. Um. And you you
(27:08):
take that information, you put it together with the model,
the simulation from the plane, the flight data recorder, and
then these days also the flight computers send out warning
messages like flight four four seven air France. It's sent
out like twenty four warning messages um in the four
minutes before it crashed. So they had that already on hand,
(27:28):
but nothing else. Yes, And then they started to piece
it together after they went and got the wreckage, which
we should say in some cases, when possible, they'll actually
piece the entire plane back together to Oh yeah, I
didn't know that. Yeah, they'll get like a huge airplane
hangar and take all the wreckage and pieces together piece
by piece and try to get the plane back together
to help that to help to help give a complete
(27:51):
picture of what the heck happened. Did you see that
the flight the Denzel Washington movie? No, I heard it
was so depressing. It was good. Wasn't they filmed that
here too in Atlanta? But yeah, it was intense for sure. Okay,
I'll check it out and then chuck Um, it's not
just airplanes where you can find black boxes, buddy, that's right.
They're on trains planes already on planes, they're on trains,
(28:16):
and sort of a newish thing is putting versions of
these and cars, um, either to give you like an
insurance break. I think you can opt for these sometimes
to prove that you're a safe driver and get it
basically tracks like how fast you go and if you're
speeding and taking turns too fast and stuff like that. Yeah,
(28:37):
but they're a little controversial, I guess because I think
in England you can actually get traffic tickets based on right. Yeah,
I knew that was coming. Yeah, but some there's some
car manufacturers that manufacture basically flight data recorders into their
cars already. It's not necessarily recording like your cockpit conversation
(28:59):
or anything like that, but it is keeping track of
your car. It's like, um, you you know how like
your car will tell you that your tire pressure is
low or your doors open or something like that. There's
something that's recording all that stuff, including all of your
engine stuff and everything else that's part of your car too,
which amounts to a black box. Because we left out
(29:21):
we said that. You know, the point of having a
black box is to figure out what the heck happened.
We didn't quite go far enough, because the point of
figuring out what the heck happened, it's such as to
satisfied curiosity. But if there's a problem that's going to
translate to other planes too, mechanical failure, right, you want
to go be able to fix it. Or if there's
a way to make planes safer in the future, um
(29:43):
or prevent an accident. That's the whole point of the
black boxes, to learn from tragedy. Yeah, they should put
the voice recorders in cars, for right, Yeah, for d
why crash? This guy sounds drunk? Pull them over all right, Focus, focus,
Like you start hearing stuff like that, you're in big trouble.
(30:05):
Like no one else was in the car saying that
out loud to yourself, but you're arguing about whether you
should focus. I shouldn't be driving, it's fine, right, we
shouldn't be joking about that. That's like super sad. Well,
this is a pretty pretty sad episode. Yeah, but we
should make pretty sad episode suggested by like a four
year old I know what's going on with Cormack I
(30:28):
don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of that.
I don't know what kind of parenting is going on.
And as hood, you are great parenting. I'm sure I
don't have anything else. I don't either. You got anything else?
I got nothing else. Well, we should like Cormack who
this is how we originally got the idea for this episode. Um,
(30:50):
we should let him play us out to listener mail.
Let's hear it. If you want to know more about
Black Boss, into a streach you are, and you can
have fun at our fun and entertaining home on the
wet stuff you should know dot com. Al Right, well
(31:11):
that was just too adorable. That's pretty cute. Maybe we
should make that a regular thing. Yeah, so I have
an idea. Okay, Um, you guys out there in podcast
listener land, if you have a cute kid, you should
records a cute kid doing our sign off for you
know whatever, saying that. If you want to get in
touch with me and chuck tweet to us, try us
on Facebook, YadA, YadA, YadA, And um, a cute kid
(31:34):
that's a fan of the show, Like, don't just train
your kid and force them to do something they don't
know what they're doing exactly, So send us that email
it to us. Email your permission for us to use it,
um and uh maybe we'll put it in some kind
of supercut or whatever. Yeah, include whether or not you
want us to say your kid's name or not. All
that j all the safety standard safety this is. That's
very exciting. We haven't had like a call out for
(31:56):
anything in a while. Yeah, this could be cool. Nice. Well, okay,
so it's listener mail time, right, Yeah, I'm gonna call
this uh clearing up some kosher things. We've had a
great response with our episode on salt, so thanks for
everyone that wrote in so far. A slight correction for
you guys on Kosher salt. You work correct on its
use of drawing blood out of meat, as eating blood
(32:18):
is against Jewish dietary laws. Simply salting the meat, though,
will not make it kosher, which is a common misconception.
To have a kosher meat, Firstly, you must have a
kosher animal, one that choose its cud and has split hoofs.
While pigs have split hooves, they do not chew their cut.
They're not kosher. Cannot be a scavenger, so no catfish
or lobsters. No lobster, I saw that felt. Oh yeah,
(32:39):
that's right. Although fish is not considered meat, it is
called parv p A r V, essentially meaning neutral, as
in not meat or dairy, which are never eaten together.
And it cannot be a predator. So no hawks or
chickens or no chicken hawks are chickens predators. Um, if
you're a worm of chickens of predator, you know what
I mean? All right? Secondly, guys, and this is key.
(32:59):
The weill must be killed in a ritual called shifting
by trained ritual s s H E, K H T
I n G the second H through me. This process
involves a super perfectly sharp, rectangular ended knife. It's about
twice as long as the particular animal's neck. It is
forbidden to stab or tear the flesh, hence the squared
(33:22):
inn and sharpness and one swift motion. The esophagus, trachea,
herotid arteries, and jugular veins are all cut. The animal
may not even feel it. Well, just's to say uh,
and we'll pass out and then die in seconds. The
blood is then drained from the animal, and after butchering,
it assaulted with coash or salt to draw out the
(33:43):
remaining blood and rinsed. You know, I knew a lot
of that because I read this very very interesting article
in Harper's Um several months ago, and this guy basically
infiltrated the meat industry and like Nebraska or something like that,
and he describes like kosher process of slaughter and how
different it is from regular process, but that they have
(34:05):
this special guy who's like a rabbi or something who
works on this line at the slaughterhouse in in Nebraska.
He's like a super specialized dude throat cutter. Yeah wow.
But he uses like this incredibly sharp instrument. It's really good.
He's a schector. It's a really really interesting article. I
can't remember the name of it, but I recommend anybody
going and finding it. You know what, maybe you can
(34:26):
post that in your blog. Do I have a blog? Yeah?
You do. Your blog posts about the best things you've
read this week. Oh yeah, yeah, maybe you should throw
it in there. All right. So those are the very
basics of kosher meat. Guys. Jewish dietary laws and certification
are much too lengthy for an email or a single
episode for that matter. It's very convoluted, highly recommend a
(34:47):
delightfully with the book called Kosher for the Clueless but
Curious by Simon Episdorff. I hope this is making words
and names. I hope I've shed some light on this
highly complex aspect of Judaism. That's for Michelle and Cedar Park, Texas.
Thanks Michelle, just near Austin, UH. If you want to
setis straight about something, we are always glad to hear
(35:09):
more information like this is. We're kind of like sponges,
you know. Um. You can tweet a short bursts of
information on Twitter at s Y s K podcast. You
can post this information at Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast, to Discovery dot com, and you can hang
out with us at our home on the web. Stuff
you Should Know dot com for more on this and
(35:35):
thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot
com
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark and they're sitting by me. Is Chuck Bryant
across from you and Jerry Rowland beside us. Here we are, Yeah,
(00:23):
this is stuff. Hey, and this is a fan request
by one of our younger fans. Yeah. When Cormack ron Dalzo,
it's right, our buddy, Joe's son and wife Cat, they
all listen as a family and it's adorable. They shout
at their stereo as a family. Yeah, apparently Cat shouted
(00:44):
at the stereo when you didn't remember thirteen year old
girls doing finger spelling sign language, Joe said. Kat was like,
how can he not have known this? That's all we did.
It wasn't around Tolito. Yeah, and you know what, Emily
didn't know about it either, and she was in Ohio,
so maybe it's everywhere but Ohio, Ohio. Colon left behind
(01:04):
as usual. It's pretty funny. But yeah, Cormack suggested that
we do an episode on black box flight recorders, and
that's what we're doing. Yeah, So Chuck, if you'll indulge
me before we get started. Um, I don't know if
you remember, but a couple of years ago a fan
sent in some day planners for us UM that were
(01:26):
like year long day planners, the the ones made out
of old library books. Yeah, and like um and they
had like h like de coupage like clicker stuff on
the on the cover. They were great. Perfect. Can't find
anything even remotely that good anywhere I've been looking for
a while. So, dear listener, if you're still out there
(01:48):
and you were listening UM, get in touch with us,
because I would love to buy those from you every year.
Oh yeah, you like those? Oh they were great? Yeah? Yeah,
you mean went crazy for it. Yeah, So if you
are that person, get in touch with us. Yeah. Stuff
podcast at Discovery dot com and put in the subject
line I'm the person Josh is looking for our day planners.
(02:11):
Uh okay, thank you, Chuck. So we're talking black boxes,
that's right, it's pretty interesting. I thought, Yeah, we should
probably put to rest the inane question of if they
can make something like a black box that can survive
an airplane car crash, why don't you just make the
whole airplane out of a black box material? And the
answer is because it wouldn't fly. Simple as that. Yeah,
(02:35):
so I'm glad we got that out of the way. Yeah,
and they're also we should go ahead and say right
up front, they're not black. Uh. They're generally like bright
orange with like reflective tape and things, because you want
to be able to find it. Yeah, amongst the rubble
as of the I think the sixties or seventies, there
became a mandate where you had to paint them bright
orange so you could find them. But they think that
(02:55):
they were called black boxes originally because either the original
ones were blacky or because it was kind of a
grim moniker because the boxes will become charred in the
wreckage and turn black. Yeah. I saw another explanation to that,
I don't think holds water. That they were initially like
round and red, and when they first debuted it, someone
(03:17):
in the room said, oh, what a nice black box,
as a smarmie thing to say, I guess about something
that's round and red. I don't know if that holds
water though. Yeah. It's weird all around. And apparently in
the aviation industry they don't call them black boxes anyway.
That's like something for the news media and jerks like us,
they probably call them crash survivalbal memory units. I think
(03:38):
what they call them is either one of the two
things that are either a flight data recorder or a
voice box. Well, there's a there's a lot of um. Yeah,
it's not that hard. But because of the media, and
in part because of this article, uh, it's very unclear
that black boxes are different things. Yeah, there's two different
(04:03):
We'll get into it, but there's really two different kinds.
And what you would think of as a black box
is actually a group of components the system that yeah,
that formed this system that's meant to record the flight
data and the cockpit um sounds, which is the discussion
and the beeps and the pings and all that of
(04:25):
every single flight that goes into the air, commercial flight yeah, um,
in order, and then it is housed in a way
that it will survive even a horrible plane crash. It's
frequently the only survivor of a plane crash. Yeah. And
we'll get to the testing of these, which I thought
was kind of the coolest part. Yeah, I thought so too.
And the whole point is, of course, is to get
(04:46):
all the data to figure out what happened in a
plane crash, what happened because very frequently that it's not. Again,
if it's the sole survivor, then there's no one there
to say, oh, well there's fire. There there's fire. It's
somebody lit a fire in the cabin and and the
whole the plain blue wall. Yeah, but you could hit
play and the pilot's going someone lit a fire in
(05:07):
the cabin, and there you have it. But it's a
little more complicated than that. Uh and goes back to uh.
In the nineteen forties there was a Finish aviation engineer
named V. A. Ho which doesn't sound finish umigration and
he did some of the first um flight recording was
(05:30):
something called the Mata Harre for World War two planes
test flights basically, but I think it was only like
instrument readings at the time. It wasn't recording uh uh
any voices like cockpit recording. Well, supposedly the Right Brothers
had some sort of recording device to record the propeller rotation.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's like there's been flight data
(05:50):
ever since there's been flight that's awesome. I found that
an Australian named David Warren was the one who really
came up with the black box recorder. Yeah, he's the
one that brought the voices into it, the actual audio recording. Okay, Yeah,
he was He was a member of a crash investigation
for a mysterious plane crash, and he thought it would
be really good if we had like a recording of
(06:11):
what was going on at the time. So he developed them. Yeah,
he's like that, you couldn't be too hard. And that
was the fifties, I believe, and they became widespread and
mandated in the sixties in Australia. It was the first
country and I guess even continent to make the mandatory.
So go uh Ozzy Yazzy Azzi so um. Initially the
(06:34):
black box recorders were UM recording on magnetic tape, and
then they moved in the strangely enough, in the late
nineties early two thousands. It wasn't until UM two eight
that they fully switched. Yeah that the f A mandated
in two thous five. There was a list of proposed
rules and one of them was, let's get rid of
(06:56):
magnetic recorders, which no one uses anymore. That's two thousand
five after all, and go to solid state digital record
yeah right, Uh, no cassettes even UM and uh they
the f A thought about it, and thought about and
thought about and finally said, okay, fine, we'll do that.
One of the big reasons why it was with magnetic
(07:16):
tapes you could just record the last half hour of
a cockpit conversation. Yeah, it would. It would rerecord over
itself every thirty minutes, which you know probably that's all
you need. Yeah, you want to hope that your plane
doesn't take thirty minutes to go down. Um. But the
the the big superiority that solid state has over that
(07:39):
is that the recording time is far greater, the recording
media is smaller, more durable if you were moving parts, yeah,
and so it can't break down as easily. And if
one part breaks, you can still take the solid state
memory sticks and reconfigure them and get the eat off
(08:00):
of them. Still. Yeah. They cost between ten and fifteen
grand each and are usually um comes straight from the manufacturer,
like they work with the airline manufact airplane manufacturers themselves
to like preinstall them on these planes. Right. Yeah, So
you have a black box manufacturer who sells them to
the airlines, who are the airplane manufacturers who sell the
(08:22):
airplanes to the airlines with the black boxes are installed.
It's like a part of the plane. That's right. Um,
so we should probably explain this now it's been long enough.
A black box can be one of two things, well,
one of three things really. Um. It can be the
flight data recorder, or it can be the cockpit voice recorder,
(08:44):
that's right, or it can be the crash survival baluh
memory unit. Black box refers to all three of those. Yeah,
the important thing, the only thing that really needs to
survive the crash is the crash survival of memory. That's
where the data is it and housed and um that's
the one that's super super beefed up to survive like
(09:07):
a nuclear war. Basically, so on any flight, on any
commercial flight, you have hundreds, if not thousands of sensors
going on at all times, and they are measuring things
like airspeed, altitude, UH, cabin pressure, cabin temperature, UM, wing
trim everything, What are your flaps doing? Yaw? Yeah, you
(09:32):
don't just guess it, yaw, you gotta measure it right, right,
And so all of this information is coming into the
flight computer and plugged into the flight computer is uh. Well,
basically it's like an upstream passive eavesdropping units called the
Flight Data Acquisition Unit, and it takes all of this UM.
That's up front, right, that's up front with the pilots UM,
(09:53):
and it takes all of this incoming information and it
records it. So not only is the are the pilots
and the the ground control getting all this information, but
it's being recorded as well, UM and it's being routed
to the recorders through the Flight Data Acquisition Unit. Right.
So also up front in the cockpit you're gonna have
at least four microphones and in some newer planes also
(10:16):
video cameras. Yeah, that's the newest, the latest, crazy, right,
which you can't do that on magnetic tape, you know
what I'm saying. Yeah, they have to start drinking vodka
instead of like brown liquors. What do you mean the pilots,
you know, like it's water. I'm just having some h
dwoh not not the Great Goose or Yeah, I'm joking. Okay,
(10:38):
all the pilots have been known to drink here and
there and they get in trouble. Yeah, they should get
in big trouble for you're the d D. Okay, if
you're an airline pilot, there's no way around it. The
only shouldn't do is drink and do drugs. So um,
up there to eaves drop on the pilots, and not
just the pilots, but also all the sounds going on
in the cockpit. Are these microphones and their recording everything
(11:00):
through the cockpit voice recorder? Yeah, and you talked about
the sounds, that's a big deal. Like not only do
you want to hear Captain Jim say, holy crap, our
wing is on fire, but they want to hear thirty
seconds before that if they hear just some weird noise.
And they're trained to pick up all that ambiance sound
and experts or trained too to listen out for things
(11:22):
that you would probably never notice. It's just a regular dude,
right exactly. And they can sit there and hear a
ping or a thud or a knock or a combination
of those things and be like, oh, I know what happened.
Somebody smoked in the laboratory and while they were on
their cell phone is loaded. Um, so you've got again,
you've got the cockpit voice recorder, you've got the flight
(11:42):
data recorder, and all of that info going out to
those two guys is going through the flight data Acquisition unit.
And it's sending the info all the way to the
back of the plane, where the cockpit voice recorder and
the flight data recorder are located. And why is it
located in the back, because the front of the plane
takes up most of the force of the impact, and
(12:03):
it's far likelier that something placed at the rear of
the plane, specifically like the tail cone or the aft
galley ceiling or something way in the back is going
to be likelier to survive because the rest gets mushed. Yeah,
we talked about that in our Surviving a Plane Crash episode.
And while they won't come out and say it out right,
(12:23):
it is a little bit safer in the back of
an airplane because you usually go nose down, and by
all accounts, if you drive a plane into a mountain,
captain and the co pilot are going to suffer the
worst of it. Maybe if you're in the back bathroom
having your cigarette, you're shaving like on airplane, you might
have a chance to survive, like cutting themselves. Uh and
(12:47):
speaking of mountains, chuck, this is good at places I
need to put it. There's some something called plane Crash
info dot com slash last words, and there's a lot
of It's not just this site. There's a lot of
sites that have UM recordings from black boxes from like
the last seconds or whatever. And this site also has
(13:07):
just like transcriptions of the last couple of sentences, and
one of them was mountains the last thing. But then
there's been there's other ones to like, um Ma, I
love you was one the last words of one pilot.
Another one was Pete sorry, so I get somebody screwed up.
Another one was hang on, what the hell is this? Yeah,
(13:30):
and then other ones seem like they don't realize what's
about to happen. This isn't as bad as I thought
it would be, right, Yeah, yeah, but it's pretty interesting stuff.
Some of it's pretty grim. Some of it's super sad. Yeah,
it's like not an uplifting thing. Start on read on
a Friday afternoon. Oh no, it's not uplifting, but it's
it's definitely interesting. Yeah. I would not recommend reading that
(13:50):
before you take a flight. No. As a matter of fact,
Umi was traveling UM recently while I was researching this,
and I made you send it to I was like,
I can't send her this. He's gotta fly back here.
That's awful. UM. Alright, so we talked, Uh, let's go
ahead and talk about the flight the flight data recorder. UM.
You mentioned that they are all kinds of um of
(14:13):
data being recorded, like up to seven hundred types of
data can be recorded. UM. Like they can tell when
you just turn a switch on, that's like it's logged.
All of a sudden, captain turned on, even interior cabin
light switch, you know, that's all recorded. And UM. The
f a A they require pre two thousand two planes
(14:34):
to have a minimum of eleven and twenty parameters. If
it was built after two thousand to um at least
eight parameters, right, I don't see why they just don't
log at all if they can. Well, apparently like that
that rule that forced up to eight parameters be recorded
like cost the airline industry like three million bucks or something.
(14:54):
And that's the reason they're notoriously tight. So that's why
they keep fighting it. And it's the NTSB that's say like,
let's push this along. It's two thousand five, we need
to stop using magnetic reel reel and the f a
A is like, I don't know, Well, the f A
is being pushed around by the airline industry well scary enough. Um,
I guess it's a good time to mention this. There
(15:14):
was something called the Safe Act Safe A v S
Asian and Flight Enhancement Act, and it's been up twice
and has not passed this legislation either time. And all
they're trying to do is provide a second recorder and
one of them should be deployable in the rear, which
makes sense, like if the plane hits an impact, this
(15:36):
thing pops off the back of the plane altogether and
a little clost like. I guess so because because they said, uh,
the f a A has a long history of delaying uh,
much needed upgrades in this equipment, and I guess it's
because the price or the airplane lobby. Yeah. When you
(15:57):
when your federal agency is actually like a safeguard to
protect the finances of the industry, is regulating, that's not good. No,
it's not. I can't everybody just do things right. I know,
it's frustrating, and money is typically at the root of
it all, you know, it always is. Yeah, all right,
So we talked a little bit about the testing. I
(16:20):
guess we should just talk about what these things are
built out of, why they survive that the CSMU back
in Roswell in New Mexico. No, but there are three
layers of materials to keep these things safe. Um, you
got your aluminum housing on the outside of it, and
it holds all your memory cards. No, the aluminum is inside.
(16:42):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, that makes sense. It's
the weakest link, you know what I mean, it's on
the inside surrounding it's the last stand of protection. I guess, right,
that is like you said, it's holding the memory cards,
which are the one thing you really want to survive,
the only thing. And this is right right, Yeah, I
guess it's a good point. And this is the crash
(17:03):
survivable memory Unit, which is actually a part of the
flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. But it's
also the separate It's kind of like the Holy see no,
the Holy of Holies, the temple within the Temple of Jerusalem. Yeah,
like everything else will get mangled and it doesn't matter.
(17:23):
But all you needed, like you said, are those memory cards. Right, Okay,
So so go ahead. There's an aluminum housing around the
memory card, right, and then around that you have it
insulated with a dry silica one inch of it and
that is because a lot of times some planes crash
they catch on fire. Yeah, you want to retard fire.
Put a niche of silicus stuff around this, around whatever
(17:44):
you want, your hand, your head, sure, just do it.
You won't get h And then around that is your
outer shell. And it's either stainless steel or titanium. It's
about a quarter inch thick. And that's like you know
that you're bomb casing and all of that is why
you can't bill a plane out of all this. It
would be too heavy. And so this this one to
(18:05):
three punch of a crash revivable memory unit. Um, it's
a cylinder. Did you say that? I thought it was implicit.
It's just so imagine like a steel box. And you
can also go onto how stuff works and type in um,
how black boxes working. It'll bring up images. But imagine
like a steel box that forms like an L on
(18:26):
its back right, so the foot is sticking upward into
the air. And then on the part that's along the
ground now of the L is it's cylinder that's coming up.
Looks like it's it's holding some oil or something like.
That's an oil cylinder. It's like a fat squat barrel.
Then Attached to that is this little tube another cylinder
(18:49):
but longer and shorter, that serves as the handle for
the whole unit. But it's also a beacon. Yeah, and
that's super important. Um And actually we'll get into that.
But you've got to find these things, you know. It
does no good if it's hidden behind a tree or
at the bottom of the ocean. They like to hide,
they do. So we talked about some of the testing
(19:11):
that these things go through, and it's pretty awesome. Um.
They do one, two, three, four, five, six tests, the
first of which is just a basic crash impact. They
shoot it out of an air cannon at thirty four
hundred g s into an aluminum honeycomb and it smashes
(19:31):
it with a force equal to times its own weight.
It's just like, I want to see this thing in
super SlowMo basically, which not only does this simulate the
impact of a major plane crash, it actually probably overstates
the force. I think they overstate everything, you know, and
these things survived to say, okay, good, all right, let's
(19:52):
take it on to the next test, and the flight
data recorders like wait what yeah, exactly, and they take
it onto the pin drop, which I think it's funny
that they the pin drop has nothing to do with it. Sound,
it's like engineering humor. Yeah. They take like a five
pound weight with a quarter inch steel pin coming out
of the end of it. It's like a little spike,
(20:12):
and they drop it from ten ft the spike onto
the weakest axis of the uh, the black box. It's
like a puncture test. Yeah, and it nothing happens, so
they move it on to the next test. Yeah. The
static crush, which would be a good band name. Uh.
Five minutes of five thousand pounds per square much pressure
(20:34):
applied to the six major access points. So it's just
a constant, not an impact thing. But just let me
see if I can just crush you over time with
brute force. Yeah. It's like a headlock. Yeah, the worst
headlock you can ever imagine. And then the fire test,
which uh they fire a propane fireball with three burners
at about two thousand degrees fahrenheit for an hour and
(20:57):
just let it sit there and see if it melts
or does anything or explodes or whatever. Yea, it just
sits there. Um, and then the planes frequently go down.
Well when they go down, they frequently go down into
the ocean or the sea. So your black box has
to survive underwater. So they do a deep sea immersion
test UM, which is like a pressurized tank of water
(21:19):
for twenty four hours. Uh. And then they also do
a saltwater submersion test, so this thing has to basically
sit around in saltwater for thirty days, that's right. And
finally they will let it soak in other types of
fluids like jet fuel and lubricants and fire extinguisher chemicals
and anything else in a plane that it might end
(21:40):
up submerged in. And if they can withstand sitting in
jet fuel for a period of time, then you're good
to go. Yeah. And then after all this they put
a little um mortarboard on the the cylinder and send
it along its way to be installed in an airplane.
That's right where it's Sadly, we'll only be used if
(22:00):
something really bad happens. Alright, So we've set this all up.
These things are sturdy, they're solid, they're good to go. Uh.
I think we should talk about what happens in the
event of a crash right after this place. All right,
So your plane is crashed, Yeah, we're both dead, but
(22:21):
the black box has survived. It lives on what happens
to it. Well, they have to find it first. Um And,
like we said, these things are tested to make sure
that they can withstand deep sea and salt water immersion,
which they sometimes have to. UM And in the event
that they are going to go into the water. The
little handle that has an underwater beacon installed in it
(22:45):
actually has this water detector and when water comes in
contact with the beacon, it starts to set it off
and it sends out a pink I think every minute
or thirty seconds for the next thirty days or something like. Yeah,
it's one per second for a month. Yeah. Um. And
this ping you couldn't hear it if you were listening
for it, but if you were listening through sonar, you
(23:07):
would be able to pick it up. And the beacon
sends out the ping and the people go find the
ping and they get it. They can transmit ideally, but
it can transmit up to fourteen thou feet, which is
pretty impressive, right, um And and if you can find
the beacon thanks to the ping, that's awesome. There have
(23:28):
been cases where the black boxes have been found long
after the ping stopped. Um Air France flight four or
four seven when I think two thousand nine and went
down in the Atlantic, remember that one. It was awful,
like it just disappeared into the Atlantic and they couldn't
find the wreckage for a very long time. I tried
to block out plane crashes. It was. It was a
(23:50):
bad one. It was one of the worst, most recent ones. Um.
But they couldn't find the black box for two years,
and they finally found it in sea water at twelve
thou feet after two years. And when they brought the
both of the black boxes up, they were able to
get all of the data off of them. They were
well made. Did it was it dumb luck or were
(24:11):
they searching for it? Oh? They're searching for it, Okay,
even though it stopp pinging, they just kept looking. Uh.
So you do recover it, hopefully, and then you need
to analyze the data. So they're going to transport it
to the h to a lab at the NTSP the
National Transportation Safety Board. We should say, the the country
(24:33):
that this happens in, or if it's like an international
waters the country that the airline is registered in is
responsible for leading the investigation. So in the United States
would be the NTSB. Okay, yeah, sure. Um. And just
like any relic you find, if you know about finding
undersea items that have been in salt water, you want
(24:55):
to transport that in its own state that you found it,
so in its own yeah, like if it's it's the
same thing as if you find a piece of sunken treasure.
You don't want to bring it out and dry it
off with a hair dryer. You want to keep it
submerged in saltwater because that's where it's been living. And
that's the sucking treasure pro tip from Chuck. I did
an article on that. Actually that's how I know this. Um.
(25:18):
But yeah, so if if they find it in the ocean,
they want to transport it in salt water and a
cooler to a lab where they can really treat it right,
give it the V I P treatment. Yeah. Um. And
if the whole black box is still intact, yeah, you
can actually just use it's it's computer interface. It's already
installed this part of the recorder. Yeah, you can just
(25:39):
plug it in and download all the stuff off of it. Yeah,
it can be super quick. But oftentimes that stuff, like
we said, is mangled and burned away, and so you
have to just take the memory sticks and then you know,
hook it up to a different machine so you can
retrieve the data, that's right, which takes a little longer. Yeah,
it can take weeks or months. When you get the data. Obviously,
(25:59):
when you have the flight data recorder data, you can
feed that into a computer and create a simulation using
a model to visualize what the plane was doing based
on all those readings from all those different arrays. When
you put them all together, it can create a computer
model of the plane to show what it was doing
at the time of the crash. Um, the cockpit voice
(26:22):
recorder uses a little more of human ingenuity to piece
it together, and this takes way longer. Yeah. One thing
you're gonna have is um a representative from the airline.
You're gonna have a representative from the plane builder because
they don't like their planes to go down. Um, there's
gonna be uh, I guess whatever country or in your
(26:44):
version of the NTSB is going to be there. And
then sometimes they might have a translator or language specialist,
depending on you know what nationality your your pilot was,
because i'mout to translate some stuff and you have people
who are trained in deciphering beeps and pings and Knox
and airline cockpits, and they put all this together. It's
a pretty interesting job, you know. Um. And you you
(27:08):
take that information, you put it together with the model,
the simulation from the plane, the flight data recorder, and
then these days also the flight computers send out warning
messages like flight four four seven air France. It's sent
out like twenty four warning messages um in the four
minutes before it crashed. So they had that already on hand,
(27:28):
but nothing else. Yes, And then they started to piece
it together after they went and got the wreckage, which
we should say in some cases, when possible, they'll actually
piece the entire plane back together to Oh yeah, I
didn't know that. Yeah, they'll get like a huge airplane
hangar and take all the wreckage and pieces together piece
by piece and try to get the plane back together
to help that to help to help give a complete
(27:51):
picture of what the heck happened. Did you see that
the flight the Denzel Washington movie? No, I heard it
was so depressing. It was good. Wasn't they filmed that
here too in Atlanta? But yeah, it was intense for sure. Okay,
I'll check it out and then chuck Um, it's not
just airplanes where you can find black boxes, buddy, that's right.
They're on trains planes already on planes, they're on trains,
(28:16):
and sort of a newish thing is putting versions of
these and cars, um, either to give you like an
insurance break. I think you can opt for these sometimes
to prove that you're a safe driver and get it
basically tracks like how fast you go and if you're
speeding and taking turns too fast and stuff like that. Yeah,
(28:37):
but they're a little controversial, I guess because I think
in England you can actually get traffic tickets based on right. Yeah,
I knew that was coming. Yeah, but some there's some
car manufacturers that manufacture basically flight data recorders into their
cars already. It's not necessarily recording like your cockpit conversation
(28:59):
or anything like that, but it is keeping track of
your car. It's like, um, you you know how like
your car will tell you that your tire pressure is
low or your doors open or something like that. There's
something that's recording all that stuff, including all of your
engine stuff and everything else that's part of your car too,
which amounts to a black box. Because we left out
(29:21):
we said that. You know, the point of having a
black box is to figure out what the heck happened.
We didn't quite go far enough, because the point of
figuring out what the heck happened, it's such as to
satisfied curiosity. But if there's a problem that's going to
translate to other planes too, mechanical failure, right, you want
to go be able to fix it. Or if there's
a way to make planes safer in the future, um
(29:43):
or prevent an accident. That's the whole point of the
black boxes, to learn from tragedy. Yeah, they should put
the voice recorders in cars, for right, Yeah, for d
why crash? This guy sounds drunk? Pull them over all right, Focus, focus,
Like you start hearing stuff like that, you're in big trouble.
(30:05):
Like no one else was in the car saying that
out loud to yourself, but you're arguing about whether you
should focus. I shouldn't be driving, it's fine, right, we
shouldn't be joking about that. That's like super sad. Well,
this is a pretty pretty sad episode. Yeah, but we
should make pretty sad episode suggested by like a four
year old I know what's going on with Cormack I
(30:28):
don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of that.
I don't know what kind of parenting is going on.
And as hood, you are great parenting. I'm sure I
don't have anything else. I don't either. You got anything else?
I got nothing else. Well, we should like Cormack who
this is how we originally got the idea for this episode. Um,
(30:50):
we should let him play us out to listener mail.
Let's hear it. If you want to know more about
Black Boss, into a streach you are, and you can
have fun at our fun and entertaining home on the
wet stuff you should know dot com. Al Right, well
(31:11):
that was just too adorable. That's pretty cute. Maybe we
should make that a regular thing. Yeah, so I have
an idea. Okay, Um, you guys out there in podcast
listener land, if you have a cute kid, you should
records a cute kid doing our sign off for you
know whatever, saying that. If you want to get in
touch with me and chuck tweet to us, try us
on Facebook, YadA, YadA, YadA, And um, a cute kid
(31:34):
that's a fan of the show, Like, don't just train
your kid and force them to do something they don't
know what they're doing exactly, So send us that email
it to us. Email your permission for us to use it,
um and uh maybe we'll put it in some kind
of supercut or whatever. Yeah, include whether or not you
want us to say your kid's name or not. All
that j all the safety standard safety this is. That's
very exciting. We haven't had like a call out for
(31:56):
anything in a while. Yeah, this could be cool. Nice. Well, okay,
so it's listener mail time, right, Yeah, I'm gonna call
this uh clearing up some kosher things. We've had a
great response with our episode on salt, so thanks for
everyone that wrote in so far. A slight correction for
you guys on Kosher salt. You work correct on its
use of drawing blood out of meat, as eating blood
(32:18):
is against Jewish dietary laws. Simply salting the meat, though,
will not make it kosher, which is a common misconception.
To have a kosher meat, Firstly, you must have a
kosher animal, one that choose its cud and has split hoofs.
While pigs have split hooves, they do not chew their cut.
They're not kosher. Cannot be a scavenger, so no catfish
or lobsters. No lobster, I saw that felt. Oh yeah,
(32:39):
that's right. Although fish is not considered meat, it is
called parv p A r V, essentially meaning neutral, as
in not meat or dairy, which are never eaten together.
And it cannot be a predator. So no hawks or
chickens or no chicken hawks are chickens predators. Um, if
you're a worm of chickens of predator, you know what
I mean? All right? Secondly, guys, and this is key.
(32:59):
The weill must be killed in a ritual called shifting
by trained ritual s s H E, K H T
I n G the second H through me. This process
involves a super perfectly sharp, rectangular ended knife. It's about
twice as long as the particular animal's neck. It is
forbidden to stab or tear the flesh, hence the squared
(33:22):
inn and sharpness and one swift motion. The esophagus, trachea,
herotid arteries, and jugular veins are all cut. The animal
may not even feel it. Well, just's to say uh,
and we'll pass out and then die in seconds. The
blood is then drained from the animal, and after butchering,
it assaulted with coash or salt to draw out the
(33:43):
remaining blood and rinsed. You know, I knew a lot
of that because I read this very very interesting article
in Harper's Um several months ago, and this guy basically
infiltrated the meat industry and like Nebraska or something like that,
and he describes like kosher process of slaughter and how
different it is from regular process, but that they have
(34:05):
this special guy who's like a rabbi or something who
works on this line at the slaughterhouse in in Nebraska.
He's like a super specialized dude throat cutter. Yeah wow.
But he uses like this incredibly sharp instrument. It's really good.
He's a schector. It's a really really interesting article. I
can't remember the name of it, but I recommend anybody
going and finding it. You know what, maybe you can
(34:26):
post that in your blog. Do I have a blog? Yeah?
You do. Your blog posts about the best things you've
read this week. Oh yeah, yeah, maybe you should throw
it in there. All right. So those are the very
basics of kosher meat. Guys. Jewish dietary laws and certification
are much too lengthy for an email or a single
episode for that matter. It's very convoluted, highly recommend a
(34:47):
delightfully with the book called Kosher for the Clueless but
Curious by Simon Episdorff. I hope this is making words
and names. I hope I've shed some light on this
highly complex aspect of Judaism. That's for Michelle and Cedar Park, Texas.
Thanks Michelle, just near Austin, UH. If you want to
setis straight about something, we are always glad to hear
(35:09):
more information like this is. We're kind of like sponges,
you know. Um. You can tweet a short bursts of
information on Twitter at s Y s K podcast. You
can post this information at Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast, to Discovery dot com, and you can hang
out with us at our home on the web. Stuff
you Should Know dot com for more on this and
(35:35):
thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot
com
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