‘Black Box’ Found in Pa. Has Flight Data

The flight data recorder recovered Thursday from the Pittsburgh crash of United Airlines Flight 93, about the size of a rural mailbox and painted orange despite its “black box” nickname, logs a wide variety of information about the final minutes of flight, including all the movements of the yokes, throttles, rudder pedals and other flight controls.

That data could give investigators important clues about what the person flying the plane was doing, even about whether the crash into the Pennsylvania countryside was a deliberate act.

The information on the device, recorded digitally, often survives the horrific conditions of a jetliner crash.

The recorder was being flown to the National Transportation Safety Board laboratory in Washington, where experts will attempt to retrieve the data.

Searchers have yet to recover the plane’s other black box, the cockpit voice recorder. Similar in size, shape and color to the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder notes all the noises in the cockpit during the last 30 minutes of flight, including any conversations and radio transmissions.

Recovering the cockpit voice recorder could provide crucial clues about what happened, by indicating who was in the cockpit and what was being said in the final minutes.

Both recorders are heavily armored and insulated--designed to survive 30 minutes in temperatures up to 2,000 degrees and deceleration from a speed of 400 mph to zero in a distance of 18 inches. They are placed in the tails of airplanes, which gives them the best chance of surviving a nose-first crash.

Investigators have not yet recovered the recorders on the planes that struck New York City’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in Washington. They are presumably embedded in tons of steel and concrete, less accessible than the parts of the plane that hit the ground in a wooded area of Pennsylvania.