Word: blackly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course, there was the black box of United Flight 93, which recorded 30 minutes of fearful struggle as passengers overpowered terrorist hijackers and crashed the plane into a Pennsylvania cornfield on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. United 93's passenger voice recordings were the only tapes ever to be made available to victims' family members...
These days, airplanes actually have two black boxes, the voice recorder and the flight data recorder. They can withstand temperatures up to 2,000°F and impact forces up to 100 Gs. (A G is equal to the force of the earth's gravity.) They track pilots' conversations, engine noises, air-traffic-control commands, fuel levels, landing-gear extension and retraction and dozens of other clicks and pops that might offer insights about a plane's final moments. The boxes are made out of quarter-inch-thick panels of stainless steel. And in case you're wondering, an entire...
Since the 1960s, black boxes have recorded some astonishing things. In a 1990 incident, a pilot was sucked halfway out of a broken windshield on a British Airways flight; a flight attendant held on to his legs as the co-pilot landed the plane (the pilot survived). In 1994, an Aeroflot pilot allowed his 12-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son to play with the plane's controls during a Moscow-to-Hong Kong flight. "Can I turn [the wheel]?" the black box recorded the boy saying. "Turn it." The pilot replied. "Watch the ground as you turn...
Both the Air France and Yemenia Airbus flights crashed into the ocean, which makes their black boxes incredibly hard to recover. The devices are built to withstand depths to well more than the 15,000 ft. in which Air France flight 447's boxes probably now find themselves. The boxes send out a homing signal, activated on impact, that lasts for 30 days. The time is pretty much up for Air France's beacons, but it's a good bet they'll turn up eventually; of the 20 airplanes that have crashed into water over the past 30 years, only...
...eastern Ukraine. After the fire brought national attention to an industry that was already widely frowned upon, lawmakers pounced. The legislation they passed places a temporary ban on gambling while plans are drawn up to restrict gambling to special zones, most likely in Crimea on Ukraine's southern Black Sea coast. (See pictures of Vladimir Putin's Patriotic Youth Camp...