After 31 years somebody found the flight recorder of Eastern Airlines Flight 980 which was involv

The ""tape"" is actually a spool of magnetised wire.

It might degauss a bit over time, but should otherwise be intact.

its designed to survive a plane plowing into the ground at 500mph why wouldnt it survive sitting out in the open

its condition looks no different from any other pieces of plane wreckage from hundreds of crash sites in similar regions all around the world

to be fair it can rain in a desert, sometimes

Why do they call them black box if they are orange

Because there's more than aluminum in that picture. There's also zero dirt or grime. The desert isn't some hermetically sterile environment.

Yeah, but paint degrades, plastic rots, sand and grit erode, rain and snow will often stain with dust, etc..

Ever been to the desert user? I have and aluminum isn't gold or some other magical adamantine metal. It gets crusty and non-aluminum components break down.

Without direct contact with a dissimilar metal and electrolytes aluminum degrades very very slowly. When cut it rapidly forms a dull layer of aluminium oxide on the surface that hinders further corrosion.

There is wreckage from a WW2 bombers in the high Oregon desert. It's still there.

Yes?

Lookin at the other pictures. The rubber and plastic components are in exceptional condition for the age.

No sign of either drying out and cracking.
That first picture shows us numerous rubber and plastic elements that should have begun cracking by now as the oils in them evaporated.

Though looking at the rest.
I doubt there'd be anything remotely useable on them since it looks like the tape/wire has been exposed to the elements for a prolonged period of time. Which means much of its magnetic charge will have been lost due to environmental factors.

You can see the corrosion on the parts in that pic and the paint has faded considerably

Plastic and rubber don't "dry out", they oxidize. High up on a mountain, there is much less ozone, which is the main thing that causes rubber to decay, and if the plastic is shielded from the sun (by being on the bottom side), it won't decay much either.

It being super dry most of the time will help too, stop bacteria from growing, which is another plastic decay pathway.

I am a materials scientist.

Sure they dry out.
The oils in them that make them supple evaporate.
Thats why they become hard and brittle.

WTF is that and why don't you know O3 levels actually increase with altitude up to about 20km.

I'm a scientist of nothing and I knew that.

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That's not fucking rust, it looks like paint

You know nothing. this is what happens. That's why thy sell oils for maintaining rubber and plastics. That's why your windshield gets a coat of oily fog after long periods in the hot sun, from the plastic dash outgassing.

Well here's the thing.

That rubber and plastic looks too new.
What we're seeing are internal components anyways so it clearly did not survive the crash. Plus you know it is actually in multiple pieces.

Not all elastomers are compounded with plasticisers. TPE's (polyesters, for example) are not.

But the UV exposure will reek havoc on most unsaturated polymer backbones, so spending decades in the mountains should show a lot of photodegredation.

I'd say the design failed.

I also doubt that tape has much left on it.

If the environment had enough moisture to rust aluminum, it must have been very wet indeed.

Things don't decay quickly in the desert due to how arid and sterile it is. We have a lot of trouble with tourists in Anza Borrego and Death Valley leaving orange peels wherever as that shit will never decay. You can find orange peels from decades ago out there that look like they were left yesterday.

Isn't that a matter of exposure to mold and bacteria though?

The earlier issues raised in regards to corrosion and rubber/plastic degradation are the result of exposure to the elements and chemical reactions with the air.

In the case of the rubber/plastic issue. The arid environment would only accelerate the process.

Some materials are broken down by biological elements that are missing in the desert. But regardless, we have plenty of 50+ year old wrecked planes in our desert as examples of how things don't decay. I used to live by Edwards AFB and we'd explore the crashes and abandoned shit they'd left everywhere over decades of testing and general fucking around. The only degradation was from human activity.

Muh planefu

Edwards and Norton had some fun toys out there back when they were really active. They still have a few interesting birds roosting like what I think is a B-1 Lancer caught by Google.

https:[email protected]/* */,-117.8944905,122m/data=!3m1!1e3

So what about the rubbers/plastics?
How did they hold up in that environment.
I mean naturally they remove wheels and shit, but there's seals and so on throughout the aircraft that should have degraded.

Seems legit.

My bad faggots I assumed it was lost in the ocean.

Not aluminum. Wouldn't be crashworthy.

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Do you even live in a desert?