{"title":"Colliding Views of Technological Accidents: Legal and Technical Histories of Aviation's Black Boxes.","authors":"Peter Hobbins","doi":"10.1353/tech.2025.a956851","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the contested adoption of cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders (\"black boxes\") in aviation. It uses the 1971 collision between two airliners in Sydney, Australia, as a case study. Australia, the first country to mandate cockpit voice recording for large, jet-powered airliners, encountered resistance due to the poor performance of early recorders and pushback from pilots through industrial action. The analysis reveals how technical, political, legal, and financial factors shaped air safety investigations and debates over evidence use. It also explores tensions between legal frameworks of admissibility, liability, and restitution and aviation's \"just culture,\" which encourages open admission of errors to prevent future incidents. The article argues for integrating judicial and technological perspectives to better understand aviation safety and risk epistemologies.</p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"66 2","pages":"449-479"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Technology and Culture","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2025.a956851","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
This article examines the contested adoption of cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders ("black boxes") in aviation. It uses the 1971 collision between two airliners in Sydney, Australia, as a case study. Australia, the first country to mandate cockpit voice recording for large, jet-powered airliners, encountered resistance due to the poor performance of early recorders and pushback from pilots through industrial action. The analysis reveals how technical, political, legal, and financial factors shaped air safety investigations and debates over evidence use. It also explores tensions between legal frameworks of admissibility, liability, and restitution and aviation's "just culture," which encourages open admission of errors to prevent future incidents. The article argues for integrating judicial and technological perspectives to better understand aviation safety and risk epistemologies.
期刊介绍：
Technology and Culture, the preeminent journal of the history of technology, draws on scholarship in diverse disciplines to publish insightful pieces intended for general readers as well as specialists. Subscribers include scientists, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, museum curators, archivists, scholars, librarians, educators, historians, and many others. In addition to scholarly essays, each issue features 30-40 book reviews and reviews of new museum exhibitions. To illuminate important debates and draw attention to specific topics, the journal occasionally publishes thematic issues. Technology and Culture is the official journal of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT).
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