Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Black Boxes Work

Episode Date: October 12, 2019

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. Sit in with Josh and Chuck and learn about how these grim devices are made, how they're tested and the tales they've told, in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everyone, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen how black boxes work, which I'd forgotten was a special request from our good friend, Cormac Rondazzo,

who is an absolute cute kid, where he was at the time that this came out, and now he's a cool dude, from what I understand. At any rate, kick back and enjoy a look at an amazing invention that can survive a plane crash. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and they're sitting by me as Chuck Bryant. Across from you. And Jerry Rowland. Beside us. Yep. Here we are. Yeah, this is stuff you should know. Hey, and this is a fan request

by one of our younger fans. Yeah, one Cormac Rondazzo. That'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 at the stereo when you didn't remember 13-year-old girls doing finger spelling sign language.

Joe said Cat was like, how can he not have known this? That's all we did. It wasn't around in Toledo. Yeah, and you know what? Emily didn't know about it either, and she was in Ohio, so maybe it's everywhere but Ohio. Yeah, Ohio, Colin, left behind as usual.

It's pretty funny. But yeah, Cormac suggested that we do an episode on Black Box Flight Recorders. And that's what we're doing. So, Chuck, if you'll indulge me before we get started, I don't know if you remember, but a couple of years ago, a fan sent in some day planners for us

that were year-long day planners. They're the ones made out of old library books? Yeah, and they had day coupage, like liquor stuff on the covers. They were great. Perfect. Can't find anything even remotely that good anywhere. Been looking for a while.

So, dear listener, if you are still out there and you are listening, 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, Yumi went crazy for it. Nice.

Yeah, so if you are that person, get in touch with us. Put in the subject line, I'm the person Josh is looking for. Or day planners. Or day planners. Yeah. Okay, thank you, Chuck.

Sure. 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 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. Yeah. Simple as that. Yeah. So, I'm glad we got that out of the way. Yeah, and there also, we should go ahead and say right up front,

they're not black. No. 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 60s or 70s,

there became a mandate where you had to paint them bright orange so you could find them. But they think that they were called black boxes originally because either the original ones were black. Yeah. Or because it was kind of a grim moniker because the boxes would become charred in the wreckage and turn black.

Yeah, I saw another explanation too, that I don't think holds water, that they were initially like round and red. And when they first debuted it, someone in the room said, oh, what a nice black box is a smarmy 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 survivable memory units. I think 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 lot of yeah, it's not that hard, but because of the media, and in part because of this article, it's very unclear that black boxes are different things. Yeah, there's two different, 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 form the system that's meant to record the flight data and the cockpit sounds, which is the discussion and the beeps and the pings and all that, of every single flight that goes into the air. Commercial flight. Yeah, in order, and then it's housed in a way that it will survive even a horrible plane crash.

Yeah. And 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 later on. Yeah, I thought so too. And the whole point is, of course, is to get all the data to figure out what happened in a plane crash.

What happened? Because very frequently, it's not, again, if it's the sole survivor, then there's no one there to say, oh, well, there's fire, somebody lit a fire in the cabin and the plane blew up. Yeah, but you could hit play and hear the pilots going, someone lit a fire in the cabin.

Right, yeah. And there you have it. But it's a little more complicated than that. And goes back to, in the 1940s, there was a Finnish aviation engineer named Vieho, which doesn't sound Finnish, Hitala. There is immigration.

And he did some of the first flight recording with something called the Mata Hari for World War II planes, test flights, basically. But I think it was only instrument readings at the time. Oh, really? Did you record any voices like cockpit recording? Well, supposedly the Wright brothers had some sort of recording device

to record their propeller rotations. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's like there's been flight data 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 of the cockpit. Oh, okay. Yeah, he was a member of a crash investigation for a mysterious plane crash. And he thought, it'd be really good if we had a recording of what was going on at the time. So he developed them. Yeah, he's like, that couldn't be too hard.

Right. And that was the 50s, I believe. And they became widespread and mandated in the 60s. Yeah, in Australia, it was the first country, and I guess even continent, to make the mandatory. So go Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy. Yes. Good on ya.

So, initially, the black box recorders were recording on magnetic tape, and then they moved in the, strangely enough, in the late 90s, early 2000s, it wasn't until 2008 that... Are they fully switched? Yeah, that the FAA mandated. Really? In 2005, there was a list of proposed rules.

And one of them was, let's get rid of magnetic recorders, which no one uses anymore. That's 2005, after all. And go to solid state digital recorders. Yeah, right. No, cassettes even. Right. And the FAA thought about it and thought about it

and thought about it and finally said, okay, fine, we'll do that. One of the big reasons why was with magnetic tapes, you could just record the last half hour of a cockpit conversation. Yeah, it would re-record over itself every 30 minutes, which is, you know, probably that's all you need. Yeah, you wanna hope that your plane doesn't take

30 minutes to go down. That'd be pretty bad. But the big superiority that solid state has over that is that the recording time is far greater. Yeah. The recording media is smaller, more durable. Yeah, a few removing 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 data off of them still. Yeah, they cost between 10 and 15 grand each and are usually come straight from the manufacturer, like they work with the airplane manufacturers themselves to pre-install them on these planes. Right, yeah.

So you have a black box manufacturer who sells them to the airlines who, or the airplane manufacturers who sell the airplanes to the airlines with the black boxes already installed. It's like a part of the plane. That's right. 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. It can be the flight data recorder, or it can be the cockpit voice recorder, or it can be the crash survivable 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 survivable memory unit. That's where the data is sent and housed, and that's the one that's super, super beefed up to survive like a nuclear war, basically. Right. 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, cabin pressure, cabin temperature, wing trim, everything. What are your flaps doing? Yaw. Yaw? Yeah, you don't just guess it, yaw, you gotta measure it, right? That's right.

And so all of this information is coming into the flight computer, and plugged into the flight computer is, well, basically it's like an upstream passive eavesdropping unit. It's called the Flight Data Acquisition Unit. And it takes all of this- That's up front.

Right, that's up front with the pilots. And it takes all of this incoming information, and it records it. So not only are the pilots and the ground control getting all this information, but it's being recorded as well, and it's being routed to the recorders through the Flight Data Acquisition Unit, right?

That's right. So also up front in the cockpit, you're gonna have at least four microphones, and in some newer planes, also video cameras. Yeah, that's the latest graze, huh? Right. 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? No, the pilots, you know, like it's water. I'm just having some H2O. Right. That's not the gray goose. Or, yeah, I'm joking.

Okay. Although pilots have been known to drink here and there, and they get in trouble for it. Yeah, they should get in big trouble for it. They should. You're the DD, okay? If you're an airline pilot, there's no way around it. Yeah, the only thing you shouldn't do

is drink and do drugs. Right. So up there to Eve's drop on the pilots, and not just the pilots, but also all the sounds going on in the cockpit are these microphones, and they're recording everything 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 30 seconds before that if they hear just some weird noise. Right. And they're trained to pick up all that ambient sound, and experts are trained to listen out

for things that you would probably never notice as 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 lavatory and Captain Jim's.

While they were on their cell phone. Is loaded. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So you've got, again, you've got the cockpit voice recorder. You've got the flight data recorder. Yeah.

And all of that info going out to those two guys is going through the flight data acquisition unit. And it's sending that 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 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 smushed. Yeah, we talked about that in our surviving a plane crash episode. And while they won't come out and say it outright,

it is a little bit safer in the back of an airplane. Yeah. Because you usually go nose down. And by all accounts, if you drive a plane into a mountain, the captain and the co-pilot are going to suffer the worst of it. And maybe if you're in the back bathroom having your cigarette. You're shaving like on an airplane?

You might have a chance to survive. Oh yeah, an airplane's sort of like cutting themselves. And speaking of mountains, Chuck, this is as good a place as any to put it. There's something called planecrashinfo.com slash last words. And there's a lot of, it's not just this site. There's a lot of sites that have recordings from black boxes.

No thanks. From like the last seconds or whatever. And this site also has just like transcriptions of the last couple sentences. And one of them was mountains. That was the last thing. The last thing. Wow.

But then there's other ones too. Like ma, I love you was one. The last words of one pilot. Another one was Pete, sorry. So I guess somebody screwed up. Another one was hang on, what the hell is this? That's no good. Yeah.

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. But it's pretty interesting stuff. Some of it's pretty grim. Some of it's. That's super sad.

It's like not an uplifting thing to sort of read on a Friday afternoon. Oh no, it's not uplifting. But it's definitely interesting. Yeah. I would not recommend reading that before you take a flight. No, as a matter of fact, Yumi was traveling recently while I was researching this.

She was like, shut up. And I meant to go send it to her. I was like, I can't send her this. She's got to fly back here. That's awful. All right, so let's go ahead and talk about the flight data recorder. You mentioned that there are all kinds of data being recorded.

Like up to 700 types of data can be recorded. Yeah. 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. That's all recorded. And the FAA, they require pre-2002 planes to have a minimum of 11 to 29 parameters.

If it was built after 2002, at least 88 parameters. I don't see why they just don't log at all if they can. Well, apparently that rule that forced up to 88 parameters to be recorded cost the airline industry like 300 million bucks or something. That's the reason. They're notoriously tight. So that's why they keep fighting it.

And it's the NTSB that's saying, let's push this along. It's 2005. We need to stop using magnetic reel to reel. And the FAA is like, I don't know. Well, the FAA is being pushed around by the airline industry. Well, scary enough, I guess is a good time to mention this. There was something called the SAFE Act, SAFE Aviation 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 thing pops off the back of the plane altogether. Oh, yeah.

And it has passed. And the airlines are like, well, it costs us like 50 bucks. I guess so because they said the FAA has a long history of delaying much needed upgrades in this equipment. And I guess it's because of price or the airplane lobby. Right. Yeah, when your federal agency is actually

like a safeguard to protect the finances of the industry it's regulating, that's not good. No, it's not. Why 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 guess we should just talk about what these things are built out of, why they survive, the CSMU. Back in 1945 in Roswell, New Mexico. No, but there are three layers of materials to keep these things safe.

You got your aluminum housing on the outside of it. And it holds all your memory cards. No, the aluminum is inside. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. OK, 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. Yeah. Besides the people. This is, right? That's careless.

Right, yeah, I guess that's a good point. And this is the Crash Survivable Memory Unit, which is actually a part of the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. Yeah. But it's also separate. It's kind of like the holy sea. No, the holy of holies, the temple

within the temple of Jerusalem. Yeah, like everything else will get mangled and it doesn't matter. But all you need are, like you said, are those memory cards. Right, OK, so go ahead. There's an aluminum housing around the memory cards. That's 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 when planes crash, they catch on fire. Yeah, you want to retard fire? Put an inch of silica stuff around this. Yeah. Around whatever you want, your hand, your head.

Sure. Just do it. You won't get burned. 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 that you're bomb casing. And all of that is why you can't build a plane out of all this.

Yeah, it'd be too heavy. Yeah. And so this one, two, three punch of a Crash Survivable Memory Unit, it's a cylinder. Did you say that? I thought it was implicit. So imagine like a steel box. And you can also go on to how stuff works

and type in how black box is working. It'll bring up images. Sure. But imagine like a steel box that forms like an L on its back. So the foot is sticking upward into the air. And then on the part that's along the ground now of the L is a cylinder that's coming up. Looks like it's holding some oil or something like that.

It's an oil cylinder. It's like a fat squat barrel. Yes. Then attached to that is this little tube, another cylinder, 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. And actually we'll get into that. But you've got to find these things. Right. Does no good if it's hidden behind a tree or at the bottom of an ocean. They like to hide. They do.

So we talked about some of the testing that these things go through. And it's pretty awesome. They do one, two, three, four, five, six-ish tests. The first of which is just a basic crash impact. They shoot it out of an air cannon at 3,400 Gs into an aluminum honeycomb. And it smashes it with a force equal to 3,400 times

its own weight. Right. It's just like, I want to see this thing in super slow mode, 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.

Yeah. And these things survive. They say, OK, good. All right, let's take it on to the next test. And the flight data recorder's like, wait, what? Yeah, exactly. And they take it on to the pin drop, which I think it's funny that they call it the pin drop.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with sound. It's like engineering humor. Yeah, I think you're right. They take a 500-pound weight with a 1⁄4-inch steel pin coming out of the end of it. It's like a little spike. And they drop it from 10 feet, the spike, onto the weakest axis of the black box.

Yeah, it's like a puncture test. Yeah, and nothing happens. So they move it on to the next test. Yeah, the static crush, which would be a good band name. Five minutes of 5,000 pounds per square inch pressure applied to the six major axis 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 they fire a propane fireball with three burners at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour. And just let it sit there and see if it melts or does anything.

Yeah. Or explodes or whatever. Yeah, no, it just sits there. 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,

which is like a pressurized tank of water for 24 hours. And then they also do a saltwater submersion test. So this thing has to basically sit around in saltwater for 30 days. That's right. And finally, they will let it soak in other types of fluids like jet fuel and lubricant and fire extinguisher chemicals and anything else in a plane that it might end up submerged in.

Yeah. And if it 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 mortarboard on the cylinder and send it along its way to be installed in an airplane. That's right, where it sadly will only be used if something really bad happens.

Yeah. There we go. Well, please. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping-off point.

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, so your plane has crashed. Yeah. We're both dead. Right. But the black box has survived. It lives on. What happens to it? Well, they have to find it first.

And like we said, these things are tested to make sure that they can withstand deep sea and saltwater immersion, which they sometimes have to. And in the event that they are going to go into the water, the little handle that has an underwater beacon installed in it 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 ping, I think every minute or 30 seconds for the next 30 days or something like that. Yeah, well, it's one per second for a month. Yeah. And this ping, you couldn't hear it if you were listening for it. Right. But if you were listening through Sonar,

you 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 ideally. Yeah, they can transmit ideally. But it can transmit up to 14,000 feet, which is pretty impressive. Right. And if you can find the beacon thanks to the ping,

that's awesome. There have been cases where the black boxes have been found long after the ping stopped, Air France Flight 447 from, I think, 2009, 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 a bad one. It was one of the worst, most recent ones. But they couldn't find the black box for two years. Wow. And they finally found it in seawater at 12,000 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. Wow. So they were well made. Did it, was it dumb luck, or were they searching for it? Oh, they were searching for it. OK, even though it stopped pinging, they just kept looking. Yeah.

Wow. So you do recover it, hopefully. And then you need to analyze the data. So they're going to transport it to a lab at the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board. We should say the country that this happens in, or if it's like in international waters, the country that the airline's registered in

is responsible for leading the investigation. Yeah, that makes sense. So in the United States, it'd be the NTSB. OK, yeah, sure. And just like any relic you find, if you know about finding undersea items that have been in saltwater, you want to transport that in its own state that you found it.

In its own mess. Yeah, 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 hairdryer. You want to keep it submerged in saltwater, because that's where it's been living. And that's the sunken treasure pro tip from Chuck. It is.

I did an article on that, actually. That's how I know this. But yeah, so if they find it in the ocean, they want to transport it in saltwater in a cooler to a lab where they can really treat it right, give it the VIP treatment. Right, yeah. And if the whole black box is still intact,

you can actually just use its computer interface that's already installed as part of the recorder. You can just 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 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. But when you get the data, obviously, 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. The cockpit voice recorder uses a little more of human ingenuity to piece it together. And this takes way longer. Yeah, one thing you're going to have

is a representative from the airline. You're going to have a representative from the plane builder, because they don't like their planes to go down. There's going to be, I guess, whatever country you're in, your version of the NTSB is going to be there. And then sometimes they might have a translator, a language specialist, depending on what nationality your pilot was, because they might have to translate some stuff.

And you have people who are trained in deciphering beeps and pings and knocks in airline cockpits. And they put all this together. That's a pretty interesting job. Yeah. And you 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 447 Air France. It sent out 24 warning messages in the four minutes before it crashed. So they had that already on hand. Right. 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, too. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah.

They'll get a huge airplane hanger and take all the wreckage and piece it together piece by piece and try to get the plane back together to help give a complete picture of what the heck happened. Did you see the flight, the Denzel Washington movie? No, I heard it was so depressing. It was good. Wasn't?

Yeah, man. They filmed that here, too, in Atlanta. But yeah, it was intense, for sure. OK, I'll check it out. And then Chuck, it's not just airplanes where you can fly in black boxes, buddy. That's right. They're on trains.

Planes? They're already on planes. They're on trains. And sort of a newish thing is putting versions of these in cars either to give you an insurance break. I think you can opt for these sometimes to prove that you're a safe driver and get, it basically tracks how fast you go

and if you're speeding and taking turns too fast and stuff like that. Yeah. But they're a little controversial, I guess, because I think in England you can actually get traffic tickets based on. Oh, is that right? Yeah.

I knew that was coming. Yeah. But there's some car manufacturers that manufacture basically flight data recorders into their cars already. That's not necessarily recording your cockpit conversation or anything like that, but it is keeping track of your car. It's like, you know how your car will tell you that your tire pressure's low or your door's open

or something like that? Yeah. 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 off, we said that 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 not just to satisfy curiosity, but if there's a problem that's going to translate to other planes too. Yeah, like a 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 or prevent an accident, that's the whole point

of the black box is to learn from tragedy. Yeah, they should put the voice recorders in cars for drunks. Yeah. For DUI crashes. This guy sounds drunk. Pull him over. All right, focus. Focus.

Like you start hearing stuff like that, you're in big trouble. Oh, yeah. Like no one else is in the car, you're saying that out loud to yourself. But you're arguing about whether you should focus or not. I shouldn't be driving. Oh, it's fine. Right.

We shouldn't be joking about that, that's like super sad. Well, this is a pretty sad episode. Yeah, but let me make it pretty sad episode suggested by like a four-year-old. I know. What's going on with Cormac? I don't know. We'll have to get to the bottom of that.

I don't know what kind of parenting is going on with Brandeisohousel. You 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 let Cormac, this is how we originally

got the idea for this episode. We should let him play us out to listen to your mail. Let's hear it. If you want to know more about Black Box, you take that into the search bar, and you can have fun at our fun and entertaining home on the web, stuffysignote.com. All right, well, that was just too adorable.

Yeah, it was pretty cute. Maybe we should make that a regular thing. Yeah, so I have an idea. OK. You guys out there in podcast listener land, if you have a cute kid, you should record, said cute kid, doing our sign off for whatever, saying, if you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, tweet to us,

join us on Facebook, yada, yada, yada. A cute kid that's a fan on 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.

Sure. And 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. Right, all that jazz. All the safety, standard safety. This is very exciting. We haven't had a call out for anything in a while.

Yeah, this could be cool. Well, OK, so it's listener mail time, right? Yeah, I'm going to call this 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, slight correction for you guys on kosher salt. You were correct on its use of drawing blood out of meat as eating blood as 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 chews its cud and has split hooves. While pigs have split hooves, they do not chew their cud. They are not kosher. It cannot be a scavenger, so no catfish or lobsters. No lobster, I saw that sign fell.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Although a fish is not considered meat, it is called parve, P-A-R-V, essentially meaning neutral, as in not meat or dairy, which are never eaten together. Right. And it cannot be a predator, so no hawks or chickens. Or no chicken hawks. Are chickens predators?

If you're a worm, a chicken's a predator, you know what I mean? All right, secondly, guys, and this is key, the animal must be killed in a ritual called shecting by a trained ritual slaughterer. Can you spell that? S-H-E-K-H-T-I-N-G. The second H threw me. Shecting.

This process involves a super-perfectly-sharp rectangular-ended knife that's about twice as long as the particular animal's neck. It is forbidden to stab or tear the flesh, hence the squared in and sharpness. In one swift motion, the esophagus trachea, carotid arteries, and jugular veins are all cut. The animal may not even feel it.

Well, who's to say? And will pass out and then die in seconds. The blood is then drained from the animal, and after butchering, it is salted with kosher salt to draw out the remaining blood and rinsed. You know, I knew a lot of that because I read this very, very interesting article in Harper's several months ago.

And this guy basically infiltrated the meat industry in Nebraska or something like that. And he describes a kosher process of slaughter and how different it is from regular process. They have this special guy who's like a rabbi or something who works on this line at the slaughterhouse in Nebraska. He's like a super specialized dude. Throat cutter?

Yeah. Wow. But he uses like this incredibly sharp instrument. He's really good. He's a shekter. It is a really, really interesting article. I can't remember the name of it, but I recommend anybody go in and finding it.

You know what, maybe you can post that in your blog. I have a blog? Yeah, you do your blog post about the best things you've read this week. Oh, yeah, yeah. 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. I highly recommend a delightfully witty book called Kosher for the Clueless but Curious by Simon Episdorf. I hope I've- This guy's just making words and names up.

I hope I've shed some light on this highly complex aspect of Judaism. And that is for Michelle in Cedar Park, Texas. Thanks, Michelle. And you're Austin. Nice. If you want to set us straight about something, we are always glad to hear more information.

Like this is, we're kind of like sponges, you know? Agreed. You can tweet a short burst of information on Twitter at SYSK Podcast. You can post this information at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And if you want to send an email to Chuck, Jerry and me, you can address it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

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