Malaysia Flight 370 - Black Box Question

[mrs.b]

Like many, I check in each day to see if there is any new news on the location of the missing flight. A bit ago, though, a thought occurred to me and I wondered if someone that is familiar with black box functionality might confirm. I know we have a few here that have some experience with aviation so thought I'd drop the question here.

I read somewhere that black boxes record the last two hours of cockpit conversation and details. Is that true? If it is...I thought that, even if the plane is found, it flew so long after contact was lost that the events that took place when the plane veered off course will no long be on the record, correct?

It's a mystery that I do not think will ever be solved to the satisfaction of the grieving families and general public.

[scorched]

They do indeed record a certain audio for a certain amount of time, depending on the aircraft and what box is in it.
What the box does is record until it is out of space, then it start overwriting from the beginning again.
It will have a digital time stamp, and they will know what two hours were recorded.

It will not lose the last two hours if it crashed, it will retain what it knows, because it also knew no audio was coming in any more.

[nexcole]

Airline pilot here.

When you hear "Black Box" they are referring to two distinct systems that work in concert, they are physically separate.
1. Cockpit Voice Recorder: A recording of 2 hours of audio. This will not contain the takeoff etc, if everyone was dead onboard it won't really be of any value.
2. Flight Data Recorder: This tells a lot about a flight. Basically it records parameters on just about everything under the sun that happens on the aircraft for 30 or so flight hours. This will show what went wrong physically with the aircraft. It can tell who was flying, and what systems were being used etc.

Some companies opt for a better CVR that can record even longer amounts of time than 2 hours, some up to 30. Hopefully this is the case so we can figure out what happened.

[dewisant]

And, Black Boxes are Orange in color.