Building a Better Black Box

Since Monday's horrific crash of American Airlines flight 587, we've been hearing a lot about black boxes, flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders. What does all of this in-flight technology do for us — and why do we still need it at all?

Armed with these questions and more, TIME.com conferred with Professor William Waldock, associate director of the Center for Aerospace Safety and Education at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

In this wired age, shouldn't black boxes be more or less obsolete? It seems there should be a way to constantly stream the flight information back to a set point on the ground.

William Waldock: There's a program called Datalink that's very much in the works right now; the airline industry has been talking about this for quite a while. The technology essentially means downlinking information from an airplane to a ground station.

The biggest drawback to implementing Datalink is setting up the hardware. It would mean building a ground station that could discriminate and collect data from every plane in the air. That would require a fairly complex system — and getting it in place would be a fairly laborious process.

The other reason progress has been slow on Datalink technology is that most of the time we simply have not had much of a problem with the current black boxes; on the whole, they've served us well. These things almost never fail in crashes — they generally fail only in fires. And I suspect that's what happened in the case of flight 587.

So in general, is the airline industry pleased with the performance of the current generation of black boxes?

Generally, yes — and remember, they are constantly evolving, even now. The sold-state technology we're using is still fairly new, for example.

When were black boxes first introduced?

We've seen a real revolution in black box technology. Flight data recorders were first mandated in 1969, but the first generation of black boxes, introduced in the 1950s, used metal styluses to etch the information from the plane on a piece of foil that scrolled past. They were really only capable of recording basics like altitude. It wasn't until we got into the digital flight data recorders (in the 1960s) that we started gathering more sophisticated data. And one of the side effects of the FAA mandating modern flight data recorders is that some airlines use their FDR data to improve airplane performance.

I guess by now everyone knows that black boxes are not actually black.

That's right; they're actually bright orange. The term "black box" stems from the term used in World War II to describe electronics in general.

There are two "black boxes" on each plane: A flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder. Is one of them more important in the case of an air disaster?

They're equally important, just in different ways. The flight data recorder (FDR) tells you what's going on with the plane itself — it records the physical aspect of the flight. The cockpit voice recorder records sounds, including the voices of the crew. You can also sometimes hear plane noises, information that is often quite useful during an investigation.

According to the NTSB, the flight data recorder was damaged in the crash, and so they've sent it back to its manufacturer to see if any information can be retrieved. How could they get data from a damaged recorder?

Well, the manufacturer is probably going to have to take the chips apart and look at them literally and line up the 0's and 1's. Obviously that's going to be a pretty extensive project, but how long it takes totally depends on how damaged it is.