What might be inside AirAsia Flight QZ8501’s black boxes?

The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are considered to be vital elements in figuring out the causes of commercial aviation disasters.

Indonesia’s top search and rescue official says searchers are now “striving” to find the black boxes (which are actually orange).

Here’s the lowdown on the devices, the information they are likely to hold and how investigators will go about extracting it.

What do black boxes contain?

The two devices hold different kinds of information.

The cockpit voice recorder contains “every audio sound that occurs on the flight deck,” said Desmond Ross, an aviation safety expert.

That can include things like conversation between the pilots, warning sounds from the plane’s systems and even hail hitting the windshield.

“There will be a very careful, methodical process by which these things are opened up and by which the data is extracted,” Waldron said. “This process is filmed, there’ll be officials on hand. So it’s kind of a long process.”

The flight data recorder requires special software to retrieve the reams of data it contains.

The NTSC’s final report into Adam Air Flight 574 — which crashed in Indonesian waters on New Year’s Day, 2007, killing all 102 people on board — came out more than a year after the disaster.

The report on Flight QZ8501 is likely to take at least year to cover all the different angles, according to Ross.

“It requires a lot of analysis and a lot of background-checking, as well,” he said.

CNN’s Madison Park contributed to this report.

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