No aeroplane carries a black box: it carries two orange blocks

An aircraft's black box is really two orange devices, not black, bolted to the tail: the FDR, which records flight data, and the CVR, the cockpit voice. The nickname was popularised by the Australian engineer David Warren in 1953: he called his prototype, the world's first flight recorder, the «Little Black Box». They have been painted International Orange since the sixties so they stand out among the aluminium wreckage. The international standard TSO-C123c demands they survive 1,100 °C for 30 minutes, 6,000 metres underwater for 30 days and an instant stop from 750 km/h. Inside the stainless-steel block sits an aluminium shell, 25 mm of ceramic fibre and a solid-state memory board with no moving parts. The FDR records 25 hours of data at up to 3,000 parameters per second; the CVR, the last 2 hours of cockpit audio in four channels. On sinking, an Underwater Locator Beacon pings at 37.5 kHz for 90 days.