Читать книгу Air Disasters: Dramatic black box flight recordings - Malcolm MacPherson, Malcolm MacPherson - Страница 5

Time recorded	30 minutes continuous, 2 hours for solid-state digital units
Number of channels	4
Impact tolerance	3400Gs/6.5 ms
Fire resistance	1100 deg C/30 min
Water-pressure resistance	submerged 20,000 feet
Underwater locator beacon (ULB)	37.5 KHz; battery has shelf life of six years or more, with thirty-day operation capability upon activation

I have chosen the following twenty-one transcripts on the basis of their variety and drama. I make no apologies for what to some might seem ghoulish. In editing these transcripts for publication I have not tried to ‘characterize’ the crew members whose voices are taken directly off the CVR tapes. I do not want these transcripts to read like an airport novel. Whether the captain of the downed aircraft was kind to animals, was married with children, etc—none of this seems to me to be relevant in an accident; the same goes for the passengers whose lives are equally unknown to me. I have tried to give readers a context—of weather, time, numbers of passengers, sights and sound. I have edited some of the crews’ dialogue for clarity and I have qualified some of the pilots’ jargon with bracketed definitions that laymen better understand. I want readers to know that I am not a pilot. I have never been a pilot. I have not edited this book for pilots or for other aviation experts who will almost certainly be better served reading the original versions of these transcripts.

Finally, readers might be advised to imagine themselves, rather than sitting aboard the aeroplanes mentioned in the following pages, tuned to a radio and overhearing the sounds as they happened, and events as they unfolded. Even if you are not able to visualize everything, I know you will agree with me that these transcripts are as dramatic reading as you are likely to find, because they are minute-by-minute, unvarnished accounts of what actually occurred.

Malcolm MacPherson