Who was David Warren?

Qantas chose to name its A380 aircraft after Australian aviation pioneers such as Phyllis Arnott, Reginald Ansett, John and Reginald Duigan, Bert Hinkler, Hudson Fysh, Lawrence Hargrave, Charles Kingsford Smith, Paul McGinness, Fergus McMaster, Charles Ulm, Nancy-Bird Walton, and David Warren. This illustrious group includes founders of several Australian airlines, the founder of the Australian Women Pilots’ Association, a pilot who made the first trans-Pacific flight, and another who built and flew the first Australian aircraft. Warren was honored for developing the cockpit voice recorder, the infamous “black box” that is actually painted orange.

Born nearly 100 years ago, Warren’s beginnings couldn’t have been humbler. David Ronald de Mey Warren was born in 1925 at a Christian mission station on Groot Eiland in Australia’s Northern Territory. His father was the mission’s pastor and Warren was the first European to be born on the island. Groot Eiland (Large Island) is Australia’s fourth largest island, located 400 miles east of Darwin on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Situated at one of the northernmost points in Australia, Qantas established a flying boat base there and the Royal Australian Air Force used the island’s airstrip during World War II. It’s still a remote spot today.

Warren was sent to boarding school in Tasmania and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Sydney. Next, he headed to London’s Imperial College for graduate studies where he earned a doctorate in fuels and energy research.

Returning to Australia, Warren worked as a research scientist, developing aviation fuel and fuel tanks, for more than 30 years at the Commonwealth’s Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne. In 1953, he was assigned to investigate a series of crashes of the first jet airliner, the British de Havilland DH.106 Comet. The model had suffered three fatal accidents in less than 12 months. After one of his fellow investigators suggested the latest Comet might have been hijacked, Warren conceived of a device that would record cockpit conversations.

“I kept thinking to myself, ‘if it were a pilot error, or if it were something which were known to the crew, they may have said something or done something. If only we could recapture those few seconds, it’d save all this argument and uncertainty, we’d know what it was,’” he said.

“I’d been, just the week before, to an instrument exhibition and seen the world’s first pocket recorder, the Minifon, a German unit which records on about two or three miles of very fine wire....”

His superior at ARL was not enthusiastic and told him, “It has nothing to do with fuels. You’re a chemist. Give that to the instruments group.” Warren persisted and tried to interest the Australian aviation authorities, but they replied that it had “no immediate significance” in civil aviation.

Flight data recorders had been used as early as the 1930s and, during World War II, British and American air forces experimented with devices that recorded radio and intercom chatter. However, these were not reusable and were used primarily for test flights. Warren’s invention used magnetic recording media that allowed it to be easily erased and recorded over many times, and his was the first to combine data and voice recording.

A new boss was more supportive, but warned him to work discreetly since it wasn’t a government-approved project. Warren tested microphones in aircraft cockpits and found that the background noise in military and early commercial aircraft was too loud, but inside the newer pressurized jet cockpits, voice recording was possible. In 1954, he published a report titled, “A Device for Assisting Investigation into Aircraft Accidents.” The Australian pilots union didn’t like the idea, calling it a “snooping device” and stating “no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening.”

By 1958, Warren had built his first FDR/CVR prototype, which could record four hours of instrument readings and pilot voices while automatically erasing older recordings, making it fully reusable. He was invited to demonstrate his “ARL Flight Memory Unit” to the Royal Aeronautical Establishment in England. The British were keen on it and their civil aviation authority pushed to make the device mandatory on civil aircraft, although Australia beat them to it. In 1960, Australia became the first country to make cockpit voice recorders mandatory.

Although the device started to be called a “black box,” they were painted orange to increase visibility after a crash, as they are today.

Data and voice recording equipment became mandatory for British civil aircraft in the 1960s, while in the United States, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation filed for a patent for a “Cockpit Sound Recorder” they’d developed.

Warren also had the idea for a detachable beacon that would carry the data away from a crashed airplane while sending a distress signal, which would be especially useful if the wreckage was underwater.

Initially, Warren thought the crew’s recorded voices would solve many accidents, but it’s often the incidental sounds that provide clues to an accident’s cause, such as sounds of the engines or alarms.

Warren received many awards for his invention, including the Order of Australia, which honors people for outstanding service to the nation. In 2008, Qantas named one of its A380s after him and, in 2013, he was inducted into the Australian Aviation Hall of Fame. In 2014, the Defense Science and Technology Organization renamed its headquarters, the “David Warren Building.”

Warren died July 19, 2010, aged 85, in Melbourne. He was buried in a simple pine coffin with a label affixed that read, “Flight Recorder Inventor Do Not Open,” a homage to the “Flight Recorder Do Not Open” labels affixed to all aviation “black boxes” today.

Dennis K. Johnson is a private pilot and freelance aviation writer.