Black box flight recorder inventor dies

The death of Dr David Warren brought to a close the very interesting life of a man who developed the black box that has played a crucial role in improving aviation worldwide.

He was born in 1925 at a remote mission station on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria, North Australia, and the first European child to be born on that Aboriginal settlement.

His father was killed in one of Australia's earliest air disasters in Bass Strait between Tasmania and the mainland, and the last gift received from his dad was a crystal set.

That encouraged the young David in boarding school to build radio receivers and enroll to sit for his ham ticket, hoping to become Australia's youngest radio amateur.

But this ambition was thwarted when the government imposed a ban on amateur radio with the outbreak of World War II.

However his schoolboy knowledge of electronics led him to later to build the world's first flight data recorder.

Being involved in the accident investigation of the world's first jet-power aircraft, the Comet, in 1953, led him to advocate that there be a cockpit recorder as a means of solving otherwise unexplainable aircraft crashes.

The idea initially raised little interest, so while the Principal Research Scientist, Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne, he designed and built an experimental unit that could record four hours of speech as well as flight instrument readings.

The idea took five years to be finally accepted.

Dr David Warren died aged 85.

Jim Linton VK3PC