Air travel safety has not always been as great a concern as it is now. The early period of air travel left
gaps in our understanding about what went wrong when a plane crashed. It was difficult to identify
issues that led to that crash as the data was irretrievable. An Australian, David Warren, invented the
black box that we now know today to record flight data, and voices and other sounds in aeroplane
cockpits. Standard black boxes can endure 1000 Gs or 1000 times the force of gravity. Although
named ‘black boxes’, they are actually painted bright orange to be easily identifiable.
In 2011, a new prototype for a black box was invented. However, the basis for the design was not
new thinking but a shift to studying and being inspired by woodpeckers. Sang-hee Yoon and Sungmin
Park of the University of California understood that woodpeckers can peck up to 20 times a second
with a force of 1200 Gs each time. In contrast, athletes experiencing a single 90-100 Gs collision can
experience concussion but woodpeckers do not.
Yoon and Park mimicked the design of the new black box around the four systems in place to protect
the woodpecker’s brain. They used a steel case to mimic the beak’s durability, a rubber layer
underneath to divert vibrations away from the device like the bird’s hyoid bone does for the brain,
an aluminium layer to mimic the thin layer of cerebrospinal fluid obstructing vibrations getting to the
brain, and finally tightly packed glass spheres around the device to represent the skull’s sponginess.
The final outcome was a black box that can endure 60,000 Gs or sixty times more force than a
standard black box. Kim Blackburn, an engineer at Cranfield University UK, stated ‘This study is a
fascinating example of how nature develops highly advanced structures in combination to solve
what at first seems to be an impossible challenge.’ The invention has been identified as having
potential uses in protecting spacecraft from collisions, the armed forces, athletes and race car
drivers.