The Black Box

The cockpit voice recorder, known to everyone as the black box, is actually painted Day-glo orange. It captures the last moments of an in-flight emergency and is often the only way to learn what happened. What it preserves is a second-by-second record of fear held in check by professional discipline.

This book collects those accounts, putting readers in the cockpit with pilots who are fighting gravity and time in a plane falling from the sky. It first appeared in 1984 as a Quill title. This edition adds twenty-eight incidents from 1978 to 1996. Some are well known, such as the 1996 ValuJet crash in the Everglades and the Challenger space shuttle launch. Others involve commuter prop planes, jumbo airliners and two Air Force aircraft. Few of these events have been told in full before.

Editor Malcolm MacPherson has added weather notes and descriptions of what was happening in the cockpit and cabin wherever possible. The material comes from the National Transportation Safety Board and was checked by an experienced airline captain. Each case study shows crews in an extreme emergency, with drama, terror, human error and courage.