
David Warren, inventor of the flight voice and data recorder - barking
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49012771
======
shusson
> The pilots' union responded with fury, branding the recorder a snooping
> device, and insisted "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother
> listening"

interesting I never thought this from the pilots perspective.

~~~
jhbadger
Yeah, I suppose they thought that the recordings would used primarily to
assign blame to pilots, but I don't think this has been the case. Even when
the cause of a crash is assigned to "pilot error", there is a general
recognition that it is a failure of the whole system and that the plane often
didn't give (or gave misleading) information to the pilots.

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MarkMc
Hospitals should record audio and video to systematically reduce accidents and
infections, the way that data recorders have systematically reduced aircraft
accidents.

A few years ago I was severely immunocompromised and treated in an isolated
hospital room. Too frequently a doctor or nurse would forget to wash their
hands before touching me or my IV line, or would then pick up a pen they had
dropped on the floor, or would touch their beeper, or would sneeze into their
hands, or some other lapse in hygene. One time an unusual situation and
distracted nurse led to my IV line having a large amount of air in the line,
which would have been pumped into my bloodstream if I hadn't stopped the
machine.

Of course, the patient would need to be convinced that it was worth the loss
of privacy. And the nurses would need to be convinced that individual nurses
would not be blamed.

~~~
WalterBright
> And the nurses would need to be convinced that individual nurses would not
> be blamed.

Not using that information to assign blame is crucial. It must only be used to
evaluate changes in procedures and equipment that will improve outcomes.

Legislation that guarantees that such recordings are inadmissible in court
would help a lot.

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contingencies
_A 1950s colonial mindset which said nothing good could come out of this
country, and everything good would get invented in either the UK, or Germany
or America._

As an Australian who left the country owing to a perceived lack of R&D
opportunities far later on, in 2001, and had never heard this sentiment
articulated, I found this quote very interesting. It is a shame that, even to
date, stories behind the many Australian inventions are not taught in
Australian schools. We are responsible for so many interesting things: wifi,
samba, rsync, Wikileaks, TCP half-open scanning, rubber hose cryptography,
plastic money, wave-piercing multihulls, power boards, ultrasound, pacemakers,
feature-length film, photolithography, refrigeration, permaculture, plain
tobacco packaging, swim briefs, medical penicillin, bionic ears, electric
drills, winged keels, plastic lenses, inflatable emergency rafts, New Zealand,
etc.

Perhaps the Australian government is to blame: having been outside for so
long, looking in, it seems they (especially one of the two major parties)
consistently de-fund, de-nature and over-regulate the educational and cultural
sectors of society while failing to provide viable avenues for R&D to retain
talent in the country. Their biggest 'program' seems to be reducing tax on
large-scale R&D expenses ... perhaps not realising that the very nature of
Australia's economy makes it a _terrible_ place (~zero supply chain, very high
costs, very small market, no VC, miles from anywhere, timezone unique in the
English speaking world) to perform most R&D.

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Hitton
>He recorded the rest of the flight, thinking that even if he died in that
limping transport plane, "at least I'd have proved the bastards wrong!"

>"But unfortunately we didn't prang - we just landed safely…"

Priceless.

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gumby
I just went to a funeral in the USA. It seems so Aussie to glue jokes to the
coffin and it feels like that would never happen here (I'm an Aussie so
perhaps biased).

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nottorp
<quote> He charged friends a penny to listen to cricket matches, and within a
few years was selling home-made copies at five shillings each. </quote>

Looks to me that he was one of the first audio pirates as well...

~~~
FearNotDaniel
Copies of the crystal radio, not copies of the audio stream. Unless he also
managed to invent a tape recorder, duplicator and playback device, then sell
the latter to his friends so that he could sell them the recordings...

~~~
benj111
"Unless he also managed to invent a tape recorder"

Well the point of the article is that he kind of did....

~~~
nottorp
That was much later though.

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prvc
The inventor's name was David Warren. The invention was the flight recorder.
Perhaps the title could convey this information, making it more informative on
its own.

~~~
jacquesm
The BBC has figured out that if they give away the article content in the
title people won't click.

~~~
GordonS
BBC news has gone slowly but steadily downhill over the past decade - the
dumbing down, FUD and clickbait headlines are perhaps the final steps in it's
slow march to becoming tabloid news.

~~~
PakG1
Unfortunately, could say that about a lot of other news media too.

~~~
GordonS
Many, yes. I expected better from the BBC though :(

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barking
Title is probably a bit exaggerated.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Black box flight recorders didn't save my life directly, but I'm sure that
with the number of flights I've taken in my life, my chances of dying are much
lower now thanks to improved airline safety. Those improvements are a result
of the investigations helped by the black box flight recorder.

So it's saved my life as much as an airbag: not directly from personal
experience, but by saving the source of information about a crash and
improving overall safety as a result.

~~~
icebraining
Would you have taken the same flights if planes were constantly crashing? I
know I wouldn't.

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Kaiyou
Yeah.. probably not. I never even travelled via plane.

~~~
sho
It's a good reminder of the bubble the average HN reader is likely in -
including me, and apparently this BBC writer - that something like 80% of
people have never flown.

~~~
alias_neo
In the UK, we're on a tiny little island. If we want to go anywhere
interesting, we generally have to fly. Also it's often significantly cheaper
than trains to continental Europe.

~~~
benj111
"we're on a tiny little island. If we want to go anywhere interesting"

Why is that more true of the UK than anywhere else? We're connected to the
continent via train so can in principle get to anywhere interesting that way.
Plus the UK is fairly compact and interesting in its own right, it isn't
exactly mile after mile of uninhabited wasteland.

~~~
alias_neo
It was mostly a joke, but, there is some validity in that we are surrounded by
water.

If you want to go from say, Montreaux (Switzerland) to Evian (France) or Aosta
(Italy) you can hop it your car and drive there in very little time. It's not
_quite_ that easy from here.

