Eastern 980 recorders possibly located
 

Saw this news article this morning.


Local men find doomed 1985 flight?s ?black boxes? on Bolivian mountain


I'm not involved in aviation in any capacity, so I wanted to ask, if CVR/FDRs were found mostly intact (wildly unlikely in this instance, I know) after 30+ years in harsh elements, would it be a reasonable expectation that usable data could still be extracted?

As far as I know, FDRs use magnetic media which only becomes demagnetised through extreme thermal cycles, mechanical vibration or shock and external magnetic fields.

I once worked on a demagnetiser for television video tapes, and those machines use a lot of energy and intense magnetic fields to wipe the tapes.

So, since these FDRs have been static and immobile at quite low temperatures on a mountain; I would have thought that there would be a reasonable chance of data recovery?

Bane of aged magnetic tape recovery is 'print though' due to long term static physical contact between layers.

Every storage medium has a long term problem whether scratches and erosion on the original smoked discs to modern solid state memory modules just losing their grip on data from the 10th year onwards as recently discovered.

There's a specialised lab in California that has a record for fighting domain theory and delving down more than ten layers of overwritten recordings on magnetic tape to get usable data. The experts who can help are out there with aged induced print though due to the huge effect it has had on entertainment archives.

Rob