Finding the Box

Sometime during the Summer of 2015, I found myself down a rabbit hole on the internet. You’ve been there. You google something that you’ve been randomly thinking about, and you follow link after link until eventually your somewhere you’d never thought you’d be. Not lost per se, just out of your normal internet neighborhood.

I sat at home in Somerville wondering about the status of the search for that Malaysian airplane that crashed near Australia a few years back. Was someone still looking for it? How many people? Have they found anything? Do they think they have a better idea of where it is? I learned that there was, in fact, a team still looking for MH370, that a few pieces had washed ashore around the world, and that the team had found a couple hundred year old shipwreck that looked pretty interesting in the sonar imagery.

It’s after this that I found myself on a wikipedia page listing all of the unrecovered flight recorders from plane crashes as long as there have been flight recorders, going back to 1965. There are 19 ‘black boxes’ that have never been recovered. The list includes ten plane crashes into a sea or ocean, flights United 175 and American 11 that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, and Eastern Airlines 980 with the following description:

“Due to the extreme high altitude and inaccessibility of the accident location, the FDR and CVR were never recovered.”

That single line screamed out like a challenge. How is it that there is a place on this earth that we can’t reach? Surely it’s possible, and we simply chose not to. The National Transportation Safety Board, in January 1985, sent a team out to the crash site on the side of Mount Illimani to investigate. They came within sight of the debris but, at 19,600 feet, the team began suffering from altitude sickness and putting 2 and 2 together, they recorded this crash as a CFIT, pilot speak for ‘controlled flight into terrain.’ Basically, they flew into the mountain because presumably, weather and conditions made it hard to see while they were off course. [correction: see https:[email protected][email protected]lt for more on the NTSB’s investigation. There was not an immediate search, and in fact it took 10 months for a cursory investigation at the crash site.]

Being primed for an unusual adventure in 2016, we saw opportunity here. Hiking? Check. Type 2 fun? Check. New place and culture? Check. Will it still be a great adventure if we don’t succeed? Check. Low probability of searching for hidden treasure in the completely wrong location? Check.

With this, the wheels began rolling. Could we travel to La Paz, push ourselves on an otherwise grueling hike, and do something that’s otherwise productive to the world at large, even if marginally so? Sure there isn’t a team currently searching for the flight recorder, but someone would be happy if it was found, wouldn’t they? What would it take to hike up Mount Illimani and find a black box that might be buried under feet of snow and ice?

We’re about to find out. In about five weeks, Isaac and I are flying to La Paz, Bolivia and hiking up Mount Illimani to find the Flight Data Recorder and/or the Cockpit Voice Recorder. Our goals include: survive the trip (Isaac seems pretty concerned about this, and I’m glad he is), meet some people, overcome the difficulty of the task, and find that black box. Neither of us have been at this altitude before but we’ve got a plan to get us physically ready.

This is the first of several blog posts to document this trip. We’ll record some of the facts, some of the assumptions, and some of the questions along the way (would drone-mounted ground penetrating radar help focus our snow digging efforts at 19,000 feet?).

Cheers to living a life of adventure.