WASHINGTON — Far beneath the rolling blue Indian Ocean, at a depth where sunlight turns a washed-out gray, very possibly sit 239 people still buckled in their seats, and a device about the size of a canteloupe that could tell why they died.
Finding that melon-size black box from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will take a near miracle, but if it is brought to the surface in a year or two — or, perhaps, three or four — there is a chance it will end up in a nondescript office building in Washington.
There are only a handful of top-flight laboratories in the world that decode the mysteries of disaster: Among them are one in Paris and another that’s two hours west of Berlin. But there is none better than the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
This is where some of the world’s most vexing aviation mysteries have been explored. Was TWA Flight 800 brought down by an explosion or a missile? Was the EgyptAir 990 crash a malfunction or the act of a suicidal pilot? What caused Alaska Airlines Flight 261 to roll belly up and plunge into the Pacific?
After every big airline disaster — most recently, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 going down over Ukraine in July — the first quest of investigators is to recover the two recorders.
The black boxes aboard commercial jets are a marriage of two elements: a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder. What the first records is obvious, but the second is required to collect a minimum of 88 data points, and most modern planes actually record hundreds and sometimes more than a thousand.
They spread through the plane like the capillaries in your body, tracking the plane’s performance on matters major and minuscule.
In the NTSB lab, bins filled with every type of black box in use are stacked in one corner, and they have one thing in common: They’re not black. They are orange.
Joseph Kolly, director of the NTSB’s Office of Research and Engineering, explains that “black box” is a term that engineers use to describe any electronic device that has an input and output. When the details of its inner workings are of little interest, they are considered “black” or “unknown.” Although experts actually do know how they work, that’s not as important as the inputs and outputs.
Although an NTSB investigation usually takes a couple of years, the people in Kolly’s lab move fast. Their goal is to analyze data from the two recorders and get a report out to investigators at the crash site within 24 hours.
“We want to guide them when they’re there,” he said. “We want to say, ‘Focus on this. It sounds like it might be this. It looks like it might be that.’ “
When the crew seems oblivious in the run-up to a disaster, “We will immediately talk to our investigators in the field and say, ‘There are the questions that you need to ask that plane crew while their memories are fresh.’ “
The boxes can be whisked to Washington from anywhere in the world in a matter of hours aboard a government jet. Unless the box was damaged or destroyed by an uncontrolled fire — think of the World Trade Center — there’s plenty to work with, even if it has been submerged for years.
The lab has a drying oven to deal with water-soaked elements and microscopes to scan each memory card. The flight-data recorder cards store 25 hours of flight history. The voice-cockpit recorder cards in the most modern black boxes record two hours of cockpit conversation.
Damaged cards usually can be repaired, or their chips moved to a new, functional memory board. If the voice-cockpit recorder memory is intact, it heads into a secure room where few people ever gain entry.
Listening to the final words of pilots who are about to die is treated as a sacred duty at the NTSB laboratory. For a major disaster, a handful of people are called together — a lab chief, someone from the airline (often a person who can identify the voices in the cockpit), a representative of the plane’s manufacturer and other key parties. They slip on headphones, sit before individual computer screens and begin to listen, not just to voices, but to every noise that was recorded.
No one is allowed to take a copy of the recording from the room. Notes are taken on color-coded slips of paper that are collected before anyone leaves the room. The NTSB will issue transcripts in its final report, but release of the audio by the agency is forbidden.
“If there ever was a leak, there are only about five people who have listened to this thing, so it has to be one of the five,” Kolly said.
The airplane that disappeared in March — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — mesmerized world attention, and more than a little of the focus fell on the failure of its black box to provide more help in the search.
“There’s a high probability if they find it, it will be usable,” Kolly said. “Whether or not it contains usable information, we don’t know.”
