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Divers have retrieved the crashed AirAsia plane's second black box from the bottom of the Java Sea, giving investigators the essential tools they need to start piecing together what brought Flight 8501 down. Transportation Ministry official Tonny Budiono says the trapped cockpit voice recorder was freed from beneath the wing's heavy ruins early Tuesday from a depth of about 30 meters (100 feet), a day after the aircraft's flight data recorder was recovered.

The important black box flight data recorder was retrieved by Indonesian divers in the Java Sea on Monday, along with the tail section of the plane that disappeared on Dec. 28. A search official said that the plane likely exploded after it hit the water, killing all 162 people on board. "On initial inspection of the debris and the tail of the plane, we believe that the explosion would have occurred because of the cabin being pressurized, and the inability to adjust the pressure would have caused (a) boom sound," said National Search and Rescue Agency Operations Coordinator Suryadi Bambang...

(Reuters) - A team of Indonesian navy divers on Monday retrieved one of the two black boxes from an AirAsia airliner that crashed two weeks ago, killing all 162 people on board, a government official said. Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather on Dec. 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. "At 7:11, we succeeded in lifting the part of the black box known as the flight data recorder," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, the head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters at a news...

Eye and head tracking sensors will make it harder to text while driving General Motors is reportedly installing sensors in its next generation of cars that will detect drivers’ eye and head motions and alert drivers to prolonged moments of distraction...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, published last week an "advanced notice of proposed rulemaking" on "vehicle-to-vehicle communications." What NHTSA is proposing could begin a transformation in the American transportation system that makes our lives better and freer — or gives government more power over where we go and when.

It took a while for EU investigators to get the black boxes from Malaysia Air 17 back fron Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists, and for good reason. According to CBS News, the plane experienced “massive explosive decompression” while cruising normally at 33,000 feet — exactly what one would see in a surface-to-air missile attack: Unreleased data from a black box retrieved from the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine show findings consistent with the plane’s fuselage being hit multiple times by shrapnel from a missile explosion, CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports.“It did what it was designed to do,”...

With the rabbit hole of conspiracies getting deeper by the hour, video has emerged showing what appears to be the "black box" flight data recorder from Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 being taken from the crash scene. As NBC reports, the men in the video are wearing Ukrainian Emergency Ministry uniforms, but a senior Ukrainian official told a news conference Sunday that rebels had taken the black boxes. This fits with reports from The Hill that pro-Russian separatists have located the black boxes for the downed Malaysia Airlines passenger jet and will hand them over to international authorities, according to...

MOSCOW, Russia — A Malaysian Boeing 777 airliner carrying 295 people on board was shot down by a surface to air missile outside the mining town of Shakhtersk in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, an area controlled by rebels. Ukrainian, Russian and pro-Russian rebel officials all confirmed that a missile had taken down the plane. It fell from a height of over 10,600 meters; everybody on board, including dozens of children and 15 members of the crew, died in the catastrophe. Pieces of the plane, human remains, passports, and money were spread in a radius of 15 kilometers around the catastrophe...

(CNN) -- The four acoustic pings at the center of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 for the past seven weeks are no longer believed to have come from the plane's black boxes, a U.S. Navy official told CNN. The acknowledgment came Wednesday as searchers wrapped up the first phase of their effort, having scanned 329 square miles of southern Indian Ocean floor without finding any wreckage from the Boeing 777-200.

Searchers Focus on April 5 Signals as Confidence Fades Over April 8 Detections Searchers preparing to resume the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 increasingly suspect that some of the electronic signals detected last month didn't come from the jetliner's black-box flight recorders, a senior Australian naval officer said. The doubts—based on further acoustic analysis of the transmissions by Australian authorities over recent weeks—represent another potential setback in the two-month-old operation. An initial underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean has already failed to find any sign of the missing plane, while a costly air-and-ship search of the ocean's...

The California Legislature is looking at a voluntary program that would tax motorists for every mile they drive. KCAL9’s Bobby Kaple reports that Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, introduced a bill to test out the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax because the state’s gas tax was no longer bringing in the revenue it used to due to people driving more fuel efficient vehicles.

Search Leader:  MH370 Black Box Rumors Unfounded! An Australian search official dismissed reports Friday that the location of the data-recording black boxes on missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had been found.

THERE are unconfirmed reports that the black box flight recorder from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has been found. Perth radio station 6PR tweeted the report, citing aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas. Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who is in China, is giving a pre-planned press conference at 2pm AEST.

The Australian navy picked up extended underwater signals in the search zone for Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU +2.44% Flight 370, in what authorities said Monday was the best lead yet in the hunt for the missing jet's "black box" flight recorders. The naval ship Ocean Shield—fitted with U.S. Navy black-box detector equipment able to pick up signals far beneath the ocean surface—has been searching an area of the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia for nearly two days. Investigators believe the area is the most likely spot where the plane may have run out of fuel, more than...

Malaysian officials admitted Saturday that the batteries on the black box of missing flight MH370 were expired and due to be replaced. The plane has been missing for 28 days. A Malaysia Airlines (MAS) MH370 flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing has lost contact with Subang Air Traffic Control at 2.40am, 8th March 2014. The plane was carrying a total number of 227 passengers including two infants and twelve crew members. The Strait Times reported: Malaysia Airlines chief executive officer (CEO) Ahmad Jauhari Yahya today confirmed that the batteries of the black box pingers of the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS)...

(CNN) -- A Chinese patrol ship looking for signs of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean discovered Saturday a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz, state news agency Xinhua reported. "That is the standard beacon frequency" for both so-called black boxes -- the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, said Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom. "They're identical." But experts cautioned that no confirmation had been made that the signal was linked to the missing plane. "This could be a variety of things," said oceanographer Simon Boxall, who said the frequency...

A Chinese ship searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 detected a "pulse signal" in the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday, but there was no evidence yet that it was linked to the missing plane, state media said. The signal picked up by the vessel's black box detector had a frequency of 37.5kHz, the official Xinhua news agency said -- identical to the beacon signal emitted by flight recorders. The announcement came nearly a month after the Malaysian jetliner disappeared off radar screens en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, triggering an unprecedented international search. Australian...

A Chinese patrol ship hunting for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner detected a pulse signal in the south Indian Ocean on Saturday, state news agency Xinhua reported, in a possible indicator of the underwater beacon from a plane's "black box". A black box detector deployed by the vessel Haixun 01 picked up the "ping" signal at around 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longitude, Xinhua said. It has not been established whether the ping is related to the disappeared Flight MH370. Xinhua further said a Chinese air force plane spotted a number of white floating objects in the...

EXCERPT Discussed for many years but never implemented, the concept of automatically transmitting data would involve using satellite links to send critical safety information from an airliner to the ground during extreme emergencies or just before a plane goes down. The information may highlight, among other things, engine and system performance, flight commands by pilots and possible problems with cockpit automation. The direct transmissions would serve as real-time substitutes when traditional "black boxes" containing digital flight data and recordings of cockpit conversations are damaged or lost, whether temporarily or permanently. "Such a solution is long overdue, considering the state of...

Ford's Global VP/Marketing and Sales, Jim Farley, said something both sinister and obvious during a panel discussion about data privacy today at CES, the big electronics trade show in Las Vegas. Because of the GPS units installed in Ford vehicles, Ford knows when its drivers are speeding, and where they are while they're doing it. Farley was trying to describe how much data Ford has on its customers, and illustrate the fact that the company uses very little of it in order to avoid raising privacy concerns: "We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it....