Black Box

I'm writing this on a flight to Darwin.  Darwin is where I spent the first 14 months or so of my marriage.  I had many experiences there I'll never forget.  One was cutting paw-paws off a tree in the middle of a cyclone to impress my new wife.  Another was winning a Radio Award for best Australian Provincial Producer.  Becoming a Dad, sunsets at Mindil Beach, singing a solo at the city's Carols by Candlelight, riding bicycles everywhere because we didn't have a car – it was a rich 14 months.

Here's another Darwin experience I'll never forget.

So, it's about 1996, I'm working in Darwin, an audio engineer with several years under my belt.  In addition to my job at the local FM station, I did voice-overs at the local TV station, and I worked part-time at a local recording studio – Kakadu Studios.  The jobs at Kakadu ranged from indigenous pop acts to alternate rock acts to flat-out weird trippy-hippy stuff where I was supervising not only the recording, but the artists as well.

By far the weirdest job I did was one, for legal reasons, I wasn't allowed to tell anyone about for years.  A cargo plane had gone down somewhere in the Territory killing both pilots, sometime in the late eighty's.  The black-box recording had been transferred to a then new technology – DA-88.  DA-88 was 8 tracks of digital audio on a HI-8 video cassette format. It was a very cool machine in its day and Kakadu Studios had several of them.   Turns out, the owner of Kakadu studios and I were the only people in Darwin who knew how to operate one of these machines.  The owner was away, so I took the morning off work to sit in a studio with a team of lawyers and the wife of one of the pilots.

It was surreal.  First, I had to swear that I wouldn't talk about the proceedings for 7 years or so.  Then my job was simple.  Operate the tape, adjust the volume when necessary and take cue points as we listened through.  Oh, and don't say anything.  Don't offer opinion or words of comfort, just sit there and keep quiet.  That was easy.

It was the first time the pilot's wife had heard the tape in a couple of years, and its impact on her was obvious.  As we listened to a couple of hours of banter and flight-speak, everything seemed fine.  It was probably only the last 45 seconds of the recording that gave away that anything was wrong.  All along I had been trying to prepare myself for what was coming.  I really didn't know what to expect.  Screaming?  A crashing sound?  As it turned out, every scenario I tried to imagine was wrong, and what actually happened at the end took my breath away.

The only time I was tempted to say anything, and it wasn't a strong temptation, was when the legal guys were trying to analyse a clicking sound.  The wife was arguing the sound was that of a switch being flicked.  One of the lawyers was suggesting it could have been anything, a pen click for example.  I really, really doubted it was a pen, but what I thought was irrelevant, of course.

The final moments were haunting.  The pilots seem to be in disagreement over the miscalculation of some numbers – coordinates or something.  It was a professional but serious discussion in flight-speak and then a few seconds of silence, then just two words.

It was the way the two words were spoken which really sobered me.  I really don't know the details of what happened, it was difficult to determine what was going on, but when one pilot said his final words, there was no panic, no shouting and no sobbing.  All I could hear in his voice was quiet surprise mixed with resignation and anger; the kind that befits a situation in which a seasoned, intelligent professional makes a simple mistake that has unavoidable consequences which seem unfairly disproportionate.  Bad mathematics equals death?

You know, it's amazing how much emotion you can draw out of just two words.

"Oh f**k".

Whatever he realised, it was too late to correct.  A few seconds later, a very short static click followed by silence, and all the people in the room with me simply hung their heads.  The wife, old enough to be my mum, just burst into tears.  I kinda wanted to go outside and express some emotion.  I kinda wanted to say "oh f**k" too, but for different reasons.  The air was thick with sadness and tension, and disbelief on my part, and I was finding it hard to breath.

The session went on.  We reviewed some of the pilot's conversation and some background sounds.  We listened to the ending once more, just for laughs...  Overall, it was a fascinating process.  I suppose there are people who do stuff like that every day.  Hats off to you, your robotic emotional control and your hearts of steel.

Oh and to the guy flying the plane I'm on as I write this... please use a calculator.