Word: box
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with you every time you fly. They record where you're going, how fast you're traveling and whether everything on your airplane is functioning normally. Their ability to withstand almost any disaster makes them seem like something out of a comic book. Known as the mysterious "black box," these flight-data recorders are actually not black but orange - and when a plane falls from the sky, they're sometimes the only thing that can help authorities discover exactly what happened...
...June 1 Air France wreck in Brazil inspired the largest marine search for a black box in aviation history (which so far has turned up nothing), and now another sea crash has experts scanning the Indian Ocean for the flight recorders to the Yemenia Airbus A310 jet that went down near the Comoros Islands in the early morning hours of June 30. (See pictures of the latest clues in the Flight 447 crash...
...onboard - because there wasn't any useful information preserved in the crash. Over the next few years, he developed a prototype for a flight-memory recorder that would track basic information like altitude and direction. Encased in asbestos and metal, the data and sound recorder was nicknamed the "black box," after the general term for a seemingly magical gadget that no one knows how to work...
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...
...than in other states. For more than 30 years California has been living with a system of minority rule in which 34% of the legislature or a local community can stonewall the majority. Facing this post-Proposition 13 system, California's various interest groups have increasingly used the ballot box to protect themselves - but by so doing have mandated budgetary havoc...