Flight Data Recorder

A flight data recorder is an electronic device carried aboard an aircraft to record instructions sent to its systems and dozens of flight parameters several times per second, so investigators can reconstruct events after an accident. The French engineers Francois Hussenot and Paul Beaudouin built an early photographic recorder at Marignane in 1939 that scratched flight data onto scrolling film, and the Finnish engineer Veijo Hietala built Mata-Hari in 1942, described as the first modern flight data recorder, a mechanical device for capturing test-flight data. The Australian scientist David Warren, working at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories, conceived a combined data and voice recorder and built a prototype he called the ARL Flight Memory Unit in 1956, followed by the first combined flight-data and cockpit-voice recorder prototype in 1958, while the American engineer James J. Ryan separately patented flight recorder technology he had filed for in 1953, granted in 1960.