On the theme of All around the world. I would like to talk about three significant anniversaries. And a single date.
I’ll start with the most important one — my wife’s birthday.
On the 23rd of March two thousand and twenty my wife reached one of those milestones that deserves to be celebrated.
A trip around the world would not have been out of the question.
But on March 23 twenty twenty there was no chance of that. As you may recall, that very same day marked probably the biggest lockdown of the Covid pandemic.
Joking that my wife’s birthday had stopped the nation – like the Melbourne Cup – soon wore thin.
The border was shut. Our visit to the Hermitage was not going to happen.
It seemed the like the world when Smithy was flying.
So let’s move onto the the third anniversary, the 23rd of March…this year….2022.
PCRs and RATS have become part of our life. This anniversary celebrates a different kind of diagnostic tool to help guarantee our safety.
And maybe a reason to feel more optimistic about travelling all around the world once more.
March 23 marks 60 years since the first and only in air test of the first fully functional Black Box flight data and cockpit voice recorder prototype.
These days recovering the Black Box after an air disaster to analyse its contents for the cause of the accident is a familiar concept.
In 1953 it was the revolutionary idea of Dr David Warren from Australia’s Aeronautical Research Laboratories, an expert fuel chemist who was brought in with a diverse group of other aviation experts to try and diagnose the unknown deadly failings that brought down the world’s first jet airliner the De Havilland Comet, not once but several times.
There were thousands of pieces of potential physical evidence. But if only you could eavesdrop on the last minutes of a fatal flight a crucial clue could be revealed by the background sounds and the words of the crew in the cockpit. That seemed like a fantasy.
Nine years and dozens of frustrating obstacles later it became a reality when a Civil Aviation Fokker Friendship took off from Essendon Airport on March 23 1962 to test the advanced pre-production prototype of the ARL Flight Recorder.
Of the team of David Warren and three ARL scientific staff who developed this prototype only Ken Fraser is still alive.
He was pleased to be reminded the anniversary was coming up.
He commented “If I had to pick the most significant black box day for me that would be it.”
Interviewed about the test flight by author Janice Peterson Witham in the year 2000 Ken Fraser reminisced-
“It was one thing to get the unit to work perfectly on the bench in the lab, but quite another to actually install it on an aeroplane and get it going. Looking back over my career, the number of times something hasn’t gone wrong is practically negligible. Something always goes wrong the first time. But that test flight really went without a hitch. We got everything.”
That ‘everything’ comprised the cockpit voice recording filtered to guarantee audibility against loud background noise – the CVR – and the Flight Data Recorder which recorded 8 different flight data about the aircraft’s performance. All captured on fire proof stainless steel wire roughly the thickness of a human hair.
Perfecting it pushed the technology of the day to the limit.
Next step was in the hands of British firm S Davall and Sons who produced the rare Red Egg demonstration unit in the Museum’s collection.
The ARL Flight Recorder was a world first that came before its time. The team would wait almost forty years for the recognition they deserved.
In February 2001 the team was jointly awarded the Lawrence Hargrave Award granted by the Australian Division of The Royal Aeronautical Society.
For two it was a posthumous award.
For David Warren, the originator and ever persistent promoter of this extraordinary safety device, history would finally catch up in a number ways with which he was recognised, including having a Qantas A380 and a Government building in Australia’s capital named after him.
Now….check the date on your passport, book a ticket to somewhere exciting and….relax.
If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll know exactly what happened…
