#918: FlyFiles

As a paranoid plane passenger, it concerns me that the flight safety recorder from any crashed plane might just be irrecoverable.

Airlines seem to fit one or two of these systems to their aircraft (at the rear, where the damage sustained under impact is usually less). Why only two? Is it to save money?

Today’s invention a connected system of several such ‘black boxes’, each of which contains exactly the same data at any time when fitted into a single aircraft. This means there are simply more copies and thus more chance of discovering the data describing the causes of the problem.

One of these boxes (made to be both highly robust and buoyant) would be jettisoned automatically if it detected a sharp descent to zero altitude (thus avoiding the loss of data on the sea floor or due to fire in the fuselage during a crash on land).