David Warren (inventor)

David Warren AO ( born March 20, 1925 on Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory, † July 19, 2010 in Melbourne) was an Australian scientist who was made ​​famous by the invention of the flight data recorder. He studied in Sydney and a doctorate in London, United Kingdom.

His childhood and early youth spent in Warren mainly boarding schools in Launceston, Tasmania, and Sydney. In 1935 Warren's father at one of the first aircraft crashes in Australia's history to life. The last gift from his father was a crystal set, the evening listening to the radio with the Warren in the dormitory of the boarding school. The detector receiver sparked his interest in electrical engineering. He began to build as a hobby radios. As had been banned because of the war amateur radio and his hope, the youngest ham radio operator in Australia to be dampened, he turned to chemistry.

From 1944 to 1946 Warren was a math and chemistry teachers in Geelong, Victoria. He then worked until 1948 as a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Sydney working. Subsequently, he was until 1951 Scientific Officer at the Woomera Rocket Range and at Imperial College, London.

From 1951 to 1983 he held the position of Principal Research Scientist at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories ( ARL) as a specialist for fuels in aviation in Melbourne. In the years 1953 and 1954, an enigmatic series of crash de Havilland Comet jet aircraft, which is neither survivors nor were eyewitnesses who could be interviewed about the cause occurred. As with the investigation of this accident series commissioned member of the ARL Warren conceived in 1956 with the simplest means the prototype of the first practicable flight data recorder, the ARL Flight Memory Unit. Aviation industry, airlines and aviation safety authorities were barely interested in it initially. Only in 1961 the Australian airlines were required by law to install flight data recorder in their machines.

1981 to 1982 he was scientific adviser to the Parliament of the State of Victoria.

Warren was appointed in 2002 for his services to the aviation industry, particularly through the early conceptual work and the development of a prototype of the flight data recorder to the Officer of the Order of Australia.

Trivia

• Based on the lettering on flight recorders " Flight Recorder; Do not open " carried the coffin Warrens the words" Flight Recorder Inventor; Do not open ".
• The 2011 delivered Airbus A380 Qantas with registration VH - OQI was named after Warren.