The first thing to know about an airliner’s “black box” is that it’s actually bright orange. There are also two of them: one records mounds of flight data, from the aircraft's speed and ...

"Black box" flight recorders are orange to make them stand out and easy to retrieve in a crash scene. | Credit: marko_n via Getty Images In the mid-1950s, while investigating a series of ...

After I watched a rough cut of "Crash of Flight 111" here at the NOVA offices, a colleague who watched it with me asked, "Why don't they just beam black-box data in real time to ground stations ...