The inventor of the black box flight recorder, Australian Dr David Warren, has been posthumously awarded the Edward Warner Award by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). The award is recognised as the greatest single honour the international civil aviation community can bestow.
Dr Warren was a research scientist at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory (ARL) in Melbourne during the mid-1950s and was involved in the accident investigations related to the mysterious crash of the world’s first jet-powered commercial aircraft, the Comet. It occurred to him that it would have been useful to have a recording of what had happened in the aeroplane immediately prior to the crash.
In his own time, he built a demonstration recorder that could continually store up to four hours of speech, prior to any accident, as well as flight instrument readings.
It took a while to get authorities interested in the device and it was only after the crash of a Fokker Friendship at Mackay in 1960 that the inquiry judge strongly recommended that black box flight recorders be installed in all airliners.
Australia became the first country in the world to make cockpit-voice recording compulsory and since then it has been universally adopted as a means to investigate accidents and to prevent their recurrence.
Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester welcomed the award.
“This award highlights Australia's long history of innovation and invention, with the black box flight recorder among the most recognised and used technologies throughout the world,” the Minister said.
“Worldwide, every crash investigation agency relies upon the evidence they retrieve from Dr Warren's black box to find solutions to aviation mysteries such as tragic loss of Air France 477."
He said he was delighted that such a prominent body, representing more than 190 nations, saw fit to recognise Dr Warren with the award.
"It certainly reflects how important the black box has been to aviation safety, and most importantly, to saving people's lives,” he said.
[David Warren and a black box flight recorder. Photos: DST Group/ATSB]
Transport will be a major topic of discussion at the Australian Engineering Conference 2016 in Brisbane on November 23-25.