September 2010 The Evolution of the Airplane Black Box      Flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders  are located in the tail section of all large commercial and some smaller commercial aircraft.  They are placed in the tail because it is the part of an airplane that is usually least damaged if an airplane crashes. Current FDRs and CVRs are reactive devices. If they aren't found they can't help the investigators determine why the plane crashed.      TheTerrastar in-flight monitoring system uses proactive black boxes that transmit the data that it collects during the actual airplane flight. Company leaders feel that their system can pick up flight anomalies and provide the information to the flight crew and ground crew while the plane is flying long before a catastrophic problem causes an airplane to crash. Click to Read the Full Story

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