Accident investigators are searching for the aircraft's black-box flight recorders  Such words are sometimes heard on TV news reports about aircraft accidents...
On 10 June 1960, an accident occurred in which 29 people died in a Fokker F27 aircraft landing at Mackay in Queensland. The subsequent board of inquiry was unable to come to any definite conclusions as to the factors underlying the accident and recommended that all airliners be fitted with flight recorders. The Federal Government implemented this recommendation the following year.
Australia was one of the first countries to introduce this requirement and today, all aircraft on the Australian register with a maximum takeoff weight greater than 5,700 kg are required to carry both a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and a flight data recorder (FDR).
These 'black boxes' are in fact painted orange to help in their recovery following an accident. They are also fitted with battery-powered sonar transducers to aid underwater recovery.
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