By Carolyn Webb
DAVID Warren, the inventor of the black box flight recorder, has died in a Melbourne nursing home, aged 85.
Aviation experts and friends said Dr Warren had persisted with his invention despite being snubbed by Australian authorities.
Dr David WarrenCredit: John Woudstra
The British government snapped up the device, which records cockpit conversations and instrument data and is now a standard piece of equipment for commercial aircraft globally.
Dr Warren's biographer, Janice Peterson Witham, said lessons learned from black boxes found in plane wrecks had saved untold legions of lives by identifying human error and equipment failure.
In 1994, a black box revealed why an Aeroflot Airbus 310 had plunged into the Siberian countryside, killing 75 people. The pilot had handed the controls to his 15-year-old son.
In 1934, when Dr Warren was nine, his father, Hubert, died in a plane crash. Dr Warren was raised in Sydney, moving to Melbourne in 1951 to work at the aeronautical research laboratories, now the Defence Science and Technology Organisation.
As a chemist, in 1953 he helped investigate crashes of the first jet-powered aircraft, the Comet. Tests on fuel proved that was not the cause; the longtime electronics whiz wondered whether a tape recorder in the cockpit could provide clues to future crashes.
Dr Warren told The Age in 1998 that his colleagues thought the idea was fantasy and there was no response from government. He made a prototype in 1957, using a flame and trauma-proof wire recording element.
The Department of Civil Aviation told him Australian aviation had a good safety record and did not need the black box. The Defence Department said it would extract ''more expletives than explanations''. The pilots' union feared pilots' chat would be monitored. But a visiting British aviation official was impressed and invited Dr Warren to London. A British company, S. Davall and Sons, started manufacturing the device.
In 1976 the International Civil Aviation Organisation made the black box standard equipment. In 2002 Dr Warren received the Order of Australia.
Ms Witham said Dr Warren was proud of the device, but never bragged about it. ''He had a lot of disappointments and disillusionment. He had many detractors in Australia, and he just kept going. I think that's the lesson that we can all take, that when you really believe in something, you never give up.''
A childhood friend, Macarthur Job, of Mount Dandenong, a former air crash investigator said: ''It was an extraordinary, wonderful concept. He was an innovator, and a thoroughly good fellow.''
Julian Walsh, director of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's safety data division, said the travelling public owed ''a deal of gratitude'' to Dr Warren ''and his perseverance and his tenacity in pushing his ideas''.
Dr Warren is survived by his wife, Ruth, four children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.