electronics,
and is shaped to fit a rack in an equipment bay. Also, these days, they
employ solid state memory, rather than any kind of electro-mechanical
recording mech.

Arfa





I thought they retained wire recording, as the data survived fire
temperatures above the 150C of Si which is easily exceeded in
a sustained fire , up to something close to the melting point
of steel.

I see the recent Quantas airbourne rollercoaster affair, over Oz, is now
deemed RFI intrusion.

Probably some old VK checking if 10 metres has started opening yet ... !!


I liked the scenario of the prime-minister's motorcade, anti-bomb
detonation
phone-jammer system passing underneath that Boeing that crash landed at
Heathrow last year, just as the fuel management system failed. Compareed
to
the official version of 2 separate fuel jelling/icing events coinciding

Yes. That was an odd one. Given that the thing landed basically intact, with
a fully alive crew and completely undamaged flight recorders, it seemed
strange to me that they would very quickly wheel it away into a hangar, and
then take months to reach this conclusion. They talked about the thing
passing through an area of very cold air, and on some of the news reports
that I heard, they were talking "below -50 deg C". However, when you fly
across the Atlantic at 38000 feet, the temperature is always at around -56
deg C the whole way, according to the flight data display available as an
entertainment channel, and it doesn't seem to cause a problem. I'm sure that
designers must know this, and take it into account when working out the fuel
delivery and storage systems. When you think about how much (expensive)
systems redundancy is built into jet airliners in the pursuit of safety, it
would be a pretty unforgivable design oversight to make the fuel system not
able to cope with a few tens of degrees colder than it would normally expect
to encounter, wouldn't it ?

Arfa