Flight Data Recording Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Correct answer: False, the casing is bright orange

The casing is bright orange, often with reflective strips, so that it can be seen in wreckage, in vegetation or floating on water. Visibility is a design requirement, not an afterthought.

"Black box" is a colloquialism, usually traced to wartime usage for any sealed instrument whose internals were not the operator's concern. It has never described the colour of a flight recorder, on aircraft old or new.

Answer: D

Correct answer: It transmits on 406 megahertz for satellite detection

406 MHz belongs to the emergency locator transmitter, a radio beacon for use above water. Radio does not propagate usefully through the sea, so a submerged unit transmitting on it would be silent to any receiver.

The other three are true: the beacon emits an acoustic pulse at 37.5 kHz, is activated by immersion, and its battery life bounds the acoustic search - which is why some installations now carry 90-day units.

Answer: A

Correct answer: No, it has no crash protection at all

The mandatory requirement exists so that data survives an accident, and a recorder in an ordinary enclosure would not survive the impact, the fire or the immersion.

Recording the right parameters is not sufficient, which is why the second option fails. Nor does aircraft size change the requirement. The QAR is valuable for what it is - easily downloaded data for routine monitoring - and its accessibility is exactly what makes it unsuitable as the protected record.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Connecting it to a readout station immediately

Salt residue is conductive and corrosive. Applying power to an uncleaned, undried module can short intact tracks and drive corrosion electrochemically, destroying cells that would have been readable - and there is only one attempt at a unique record.

The other three are all part of the correct sequence: recording the condition before handling, assessing damage before any power, and cleaning and drying under controlled conditions. Haste is the one thing the procedure exists to prevent.

Answer: C

Frame capacity is finite, so a slowly varying quantity such as fuel is sampled once every few seconds while acceleration is sampled several times a second. Uniform sampling would waste capacity and lose detail simultaneously.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Building a case against individual crews

That is the one use a monitoring programme must not be put to, and the prohibition is practical as well as ethical. A programme perceived as punitive changes crew behaviour towards avoiding the recording rather than the hazard, and stops measuring anything real.

The other three are its purposes: detecting trends across many flights, measuring whether a procedural change worked, and identifying airports or approaches with recurring problems. De-identification is what protects all three.

Answer: A

Correct answer: No, it is overwritten once the retention period elapses

The voice recorder writes on a loop, holding only the most recent interval. A flight longer than the retention period leaves its earliest part already overwritten by the time the aircraft lands.

Longer sectors made the old 30-minute requirement plainly inadequate, which is why retention grew to two hours and, on new types, to 25. The recorder runs throughout the flight, so the fourth option is wrong; what it does not do is keep everything.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Magnetic tape capacity increased steadily

Tape constrained the growth rather than enabling it. Capacity was limited and the transport mechanism was a survivability weakness, so parameter lists stayed short throughout the tape era.

The other three are the genuine drivers. Aircraft systems grew more complex and produced more worth recording, investigations repeatedly found the needed parameter had not been captured, and solid-state memory removed the capacity constraint entirely - after which the limit became the frame layout rather than the storage.

Answer: C

Streaming on a trigger keeps bandwidth costs manageable and ensures some data survives if the aircraft is never found. The recorder still holds the complete data set at full rate, which no practical link could carry continuously.

Answer: D

The other three are sounds present on the flight deck or transmitted from it. Control surface position is a measured parameter and belongs to the data recorder, which is why the two recordings are correlated in an investigation.