Winston Aldworth: Black box debate is not black and white

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Deadpan comedian Steven Wright once wondered: "Why don't they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff?"

A more topical question today might be: Why not make a black box that ejects in the event of a plane crash?

As Malaysian Airlines has found in recent months, a black box that takes its secrets to a watery grave, pinned beneath wreckage on the ocean floor, is of little use. It's not going to help investigators learn from the crash and it's not going to help draw rescuers to the scene in time to help survivors.

A black box's emergency transmitter would be easier to find if the device was floating clear of the wreckage.

Over at Airbus they're on board. Their chief product security officer, Pascal Andrei, last week told a safety board looking at new technologies for tracking aircraft that Airbus was nearly ready to bring in ejecting black boxes. First up, the soon-to-launch A350s and the giant A380s - both are designed for longhaul flights over oceans.

So, a no-brainer then, right? Boeing aren't so sure.

Over at the American manufacturer, they're worried that ejectable voice and data recorders might accidentally eject at the wrong time, creating a new set of safety risks. They have no plans to change their black box designs.

Mark Smith, a Boeing safety inspector, told the board statistics suggested there was likely to be just one accident every 10 years in which a commercial jet was lost at sea and not found for more than a year.

Against that, they expected five or six accidental ejections would be likely every year. So, 50-60 accidental black box ejections per actual missing plane.

"Unintended [ejections] from a commercial airplane would not be an acceptable risk and would be a risk that we would have to manage," Smith said. "We need to beware of introducing unintended consequences into the large commercial fleet that is flying."

Would an accidental black box ejection be such a big deal? Well it might be if a bit of the thing wedged in your engine at 30,000ft.

But isn't that the sort of thing the airline manufacturers hire boffins to avoid? C'mon, Dude-With-A-Calculator-In-Your-Top-Pocket: figure it out.

Surely, the proposal is at least worth discussion. Perhaps involving figures from both Airbus and Boeing sitting around the same table like grown-ups. It's the least the 239 lost souls aboard MH370 deserve.