His Invention Saved Millions of Lives, But You've Probably Never Heard The Man's Name

On October 19, 1934, the Miss Gobart passenger plane crashed into the sea. In the waters of Bass Strait, which lies between Tasmania and mainland Australia, eight men, three women and a boy drowned. The wreckage of the plane was never found. But one passenger was able to change the future of flying without knowing it. The edition told in more detail with the BBC.

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One of the passengers on the plane was a 33-year-old Anglican missionary, the Rev. Goober Warren, who was flying to his new parish in Enfield, outside Sydney. His wife Ellie and four children were to join him.

The priest's last gift to his eight-year-old son David was a detector radio, which became a real treasure for the boy.

David Warren went to a boys' boarding school in Tasmania and played around with the device after class trying to figure out how it worked. He let his classmates listen to broadcasts of cricket matches for pennies, and a few years later he was selling home-made copies of the receiver for 5 shillings.

Young David was very charismatic and had extraordinary oratory skills. His deeply religious family dreamed of him becoming an evangelical preacher.

But a gift from Reverend Hubert made his son fall in love with science. As it turned out later, it saved more than one life.

By the time David Warren was under 30, he already had a degree from the University of Sydney, a teaching diploma from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD in chemistry from Imperial College London.

His specialty is rocket science, and he went to work as a researcher at the Aviation Research Laboratories (ADL), a branch of the Australian Ministry of Defense that specialized in aircraft.

In 1953, he became a member of an expert group that tried to unravel the dear and sad mystery: why did the British de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial airliners and the great hope of the new jet age, keep crashing?

He thought the fuel tanks were the problem, but there were dozens of possible causes - and no evidence other than debris and dead bodies. The expert group decided to discuss the information they had.

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“They talked about crew training and pilot mistakes, about the fin coming off the tail of the plane and other things that I had no idea about,” Dr. Warren recalled more than 50 years later. “I started thinking about a device I had seen the week before at the first post-war exhibition in Sydney. The first pocket recorder, the so-called miniphone. German device. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

The Miniphone was advertised as a voice recorder for businessmen who could sit at their desks (even on trains or planes), dictating letters that could later be typed by their secretaries. David, who loved swing music and played the clarinet, wanted one for himself so that he could make recordings of jazzman Woody Herman.

However, when one of his fellow scientists suggested that the last crashed plane could have been captured by intruders, something clicked in his head.

The chances that the recorder was on board and survived the explosive crash were virtually nil. But would every plane in the sky have a mini-recorder in the cockpit? If it were strong enough, the investigators who investigated the crash would never again be as confused as they are now, because they would have an audio recording of everything that happened on board before the crash. At least they would know what the pilots were saying and hearing.

The idea fascinated him. Returning to the ADL, he immediately rushed to tell his boss about it.

Unfortunately, he did not share his enthusiasm. Dr. Warren recounted his words: “It has nothing to do with chemistry or fuel. You are a chemist. Leave that to the gadgets group and move on to exploding fuel tanks."

Talk about it and you'll get fired

David knew his cockpit recorder idea was great. Without official support, he could do little with her - but he could not get her out of his head.

When his boss was promoted, David told his new boss about her. Togo was intrigued by the idea, as was Laurie Coombs, the leader of the ADL. They encouraged him to continue working on it, but not to advertise this work. Because it was not a government-approved program or weapon with which to win a war, it could not be funded.

Dr. Warren recalls Coombs' slip of the tongue: "If I find out you're talking about this with anyone, including me, I'll be forced to fire you."

It was a weighty argument for a young husband with a wife and two children.

But the support of his boss still allowed him to buy one of the precious new voice recorders as "an instrument needed for the laboratory."

Encouraged, Dr. Warren wrote up his idea in a paper titled "Air Accident Investigation Assistance Device" and sent it out to the aviation industry.

The pilots' union reacted with fury - in their opinion, such a recorder would be a controlling device, and "not a single plane in Australia would take off if Big Brother listened to it."

Australian civil aviation officials said the device was "not of immediate importance", while military aviation officials feared it "would cause more criticism than it could explain".

Dr. Warren was almost ready to admit defeat. But, as his eldest son Peter says, his father was not only stubborn, but also a nonconformist - and these traits determined his worldview.

“Dad took us skiing,” Peter recalls. “But he wore cleaning gloves because he wasn’t going to pay $30 for a pair of ski gloves.” Father was not afraid of anything. And I had no intention of waiting and following the herd.”

It was in this mood that Dr. Warren sat down in the garage and assembled his 20-year-old radio components. He decided that the only way to overcome the ridicule and distrust of critics was to create a convincing prototype.

This is how the first “black box” appeared - the flight recorder.

Put the guy on the next plane

One day in 1958, when the small flight recorder was ready, an unusual visitor came to the laboratory. Dr. Coombs was on tour with a friend from England.

"Dave," he called out. “Tell him what you are working on.”

Dr. Warren explained that in his world's first prototype, he used steel wire to store four hours of pilot talks and instrument displays. Old records were automatically deleted so that new ones could be written in their place.

There was a pause, after which the visitor said, “Coombs, old friend, this is a damn good idea. Put this guy on the next plane and we'll show it in London."

The next flight was a Hastings transport plane bound for England. To get a place on it, you had to be familiar with someone very influential. Dr. Warren wondered who this man was, handing out tickets for flights across half the world to people he saw for the first time in his life.

It turned out to be Robert Hardingham, secretary of the British Air Registration Board and a former air vice-marshal in the Royal Air Force.

David once recalled: “He was a hero, and he was a friend of Coombs. If Robert offered you a job, you took it."

A few weeks later, Dr Warren sat on a plane bound for England - with clear instructions not to tell the Australian Department of Defense what he was actually doing there, because "someone might not like it."

Ironically, the plane lost an engine over the Mediterranean.

Dr. Warren recalled: “I told the guys that we seemed to have lost the motor and asked if anyone wanted to come back. But we flew from Tunisia, where it was about 45 degrees at night. We didn't want to go back to this hell."

We decided that we would still be able to fly.

He wrote down the rest of the flight thinking that even if he died on that transport plane, he would “at least prove those scum wrong. But, unfortunately, we never crashed - but instead landed successfully..."

Black box

In England, Warren presented an "ARL flight memory unit" to the Royal Aviation Establishment and some commercial instrument makers.

The British were delighted. The Air Force devoted television and radio programs to it, and the British Civil Aviation Authority began work to make the device mandatory on civil aircraft. A Middlesex firm, S Davall and Sons, approached the ADL for the rights to manufacture the device and proceeded to manufacture it.

Although the device became known as a black box, the first products were orange to make them easier to find after an accident—and they remain that way to this day.

Peter Warren believes the name first appeared in a 1958 interview his father gave to the Air Force:

“During the conversation, one journalist called the device a “black box”. This is a general term for electronic engineering, and the name stuck with this device.

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In 1960, after a mysterious plane crash in Queensland that killed 29 people, Australia became the first country to make sound recording equipment mandatory. The ruling was the result of a judicial investigation, and it took another three years for it to become law.

Today, black boxes are fire-resistant, salt-water resistant, and housed in steel cases. And they are mandatory for every commercial flight.

It is impossible to calculate how many people owe their lives to the data recorded during the death throes of the crashed plane - how many shortcomings were thus discovered and subsequently corrected.

"I'm a happy bastard"

David Warren worked at the ADL until his retirement in 1983, becoming its chief scientist. He passed away on July 19, 2010 at the age of 85.

For more than 50 years, his pioneering work on the black box went largely unrecognized. Finally, in 1999, he was awarded the Australian Energy Institute medal, and subsequently in 2002 he became an officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to the aviation industry.

When his daughter Jenny was asked why it took so long for her father to be recognized, she noted: “He struggled with inertia. He had an extremely inquisitive mind, a scientific vision, and knew how it would work—and how it would evolve.”

Peter Warren blames "the colonial mentality of the 1950s, according to which nothing good can be done in this country, and everything worthy of attention will be invented either in Britain, or in Germany, or in the USA."

Another likely factor is the secrecy surrounding Dr. Warren's work at the ADL.

David Warren lived to see Qantas name him after the Airbus A380 in 2008. Jenny Warren says that since then she has been constantly trying to buy a ticket for this particular plane.

But Dr. Warren never saw a dime of profit from the black boxes.

He was often asked if he felt any resentment at being treated this way. Peter says his father had a standard response to this: “Yes, the government got the fruits of my labor. But at the same time, they figured nothing out of me for hundreds of other ideas that didn’t work.”

David's children inherited his sense of humor.

Peter asked that his father's favorite phrase, "I'm a happy scumbag," be included in his father's obituary.

And at the request of Jenny, Dr. Warren was buried in a coffin with the inscription “Inventor of the flight recorder. Do not open".

Do they think of their father during flights?

His daughter replies simply, "Every time."

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