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| ===== What can the 'black box' tell us about plane crashes? ===== | ===== International Women's Day protests demand equal rights and an end to discrimination, sexual violence ===== |
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| By BEN FINLEY Associated Press | By MEHMET GUZEL and ANDREW WILKS Associated Press |
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| It's one of the most important pieces of forensic evidence following a plane crash: The so-called "black box." | ISTANBUL (AP) — Women took to the streets of cities across Europe, Africa, South America and elsewhere to mark International Women's Day with demands for ending inequality and gender-based violence. |
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| There are actually two of these remarkably sturdy devices: the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. And they're typically orange, not black. | On the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey's biggest city, a rally in Kadikoy saw members of dozens of women's groups listen to speeches, dance and sing in the spring sunshine. The colorful protest was overseen by a large police presence, including officers in riot gear and a water cannon truck. |
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| Federal investigators on Friday recovered the black boxes from the passenger jet that crashed in the Potomac River just outside Washington on Wednesday, while authorities were still searching for similar devices in the military helicopter that also went down. | The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared 2025 the Year of the Family. Protesters pushed back against the idea of women's role being confined to marriage and motherhood, carrying banners reading "Family will not bind us to life" and "We will not be sacrificed to the family." |
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| One recovered flight data recorder was in good condition and its information is expected to be downloaded shortly. Water had gotten inside the cockpit voice recorder, which will make downloading the data more difficult. The collision killed 67 people in the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster since 2001. | Critics have accused the government of overseeing restrictions on women's rights and not doing enough to tackle violence against women. |
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| Here is an explanation of what black boxes are and what they can do: | Erdogan in 2021 withdrew Turkey from a European treaty, dubbed the Istanbul Convention, that protects women from domestic violence. Turkish rights group We Will Stop Femicides Platform says that 394 women were killed by men in 2024. |
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| **What are black boxes?** | "There is bullying at work, pressure from husbands and fathers at home and pressure from patriarchal society. We demand that this pressure be reduced even further," Yaz Gulgun, 52, said. |
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| The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are tools that help investigators reconstruct the events that lead up to a plane crash. | **Women across Europe and Africa march against discrimination** |
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| They're orange in color to make them easier to find in wreckage, sometimes at great ocean depths. They're usually installed a plane's tail section, which is considered the most survivable part of the aircraft, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's website. | In many other European countries, women also protested against violence, for better access to gender-specific health care, equal pay and other issues in which they don't get the same treatment as men. |
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| They're also equipped with beacons that activate when immersed in water and can transmit from depths of 14,000 feet (4,267 meters). While the battery that powers the beacon will run down after about one month, there's no definitive shelf-life for the data itself, NTSB investigators told The Associated Press in 2014. | In Poland, activists opened a center across from the parliament building in Warsaw where women can go to have abortions with pills, either alone or with other women. |
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| For example, black boxes of an Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 were found two years later from a depth of more than 10,000 feet, and technicians were able to recover most of the information. | Opening the center on International Women's Day across from the legislature was a symbolic challenge to authorities in the traditionally Roman Catholic nation, which has one of Europe's most restrictive abortion laws. |
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| If a black box has been submerged in seawater, technicians will keep them submerged in fresh water to wash away the corrosive salt. If water seeps in, the devices must be carefully dried for hours or even days using a vacuum oven to prevent memory chips from cracking. | From Athens to Madrid, Paris, Munich, Zurich and Belgrade and in many more cities across the continent, women marched to demand an end to treatment as second-class citizens in society, politics, family and at work. |
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| The electronics and memory are checked, and any necessary repairs made. Chips are scrutinized under a microscope. | In Madrid, protesters held up big hand-drawn pictures depicting Gisele Pélicot, the woman who was drugged by her now ex-husband in France over the course of a decade so that she could be raped by dozens of men while unconscious. Pélicot has become a symbol for women all over Europe in the fight against sexual violence. |
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| **What does the cockpit voice recorder do?** | Thousands of women marched in the capital Skopje and several other cities in North Macedonia to raise their voices for economic, political and social equality for women. |
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| The cockpit voice recorder collects radio transmissions and sounds such as the pilot's voices and engine noises, according to the NTSB's website. | Organizers said only about 28% of women in the country own property and in rural areas only 5%, mostly widows, have property in their name. Only 18 out of 100 women surveyed in rural areas responded that their parents divided family property equally between the brother and sister. "The rest were gender discriminated against within their family," they said. |
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| Depending on what happened, investigators may pay close attention to the engine noise, stall warnings and other clicks and pops, the NTSB said. And from those sounds, investigators can often determine engine speed and the failure of some systems. | In Nigeria's capital, Lagos, thousands of women gathered at the Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, dancing and signing and celebrating their womanhood. Many were dressed in purple — the traditional color of the women's liberation movement. |
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| Investigators are also listening to conversations between the pilots and crew and communications with air traffic control. Experts make a meticulous transcript of the voice recording, which can take up to a week. | In Russia, the women's day celebrations had a more official tone, with honor guard soldiers presenting yellow tulips to girls and women during a celebration in St. Petersburg. |
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| **What does the flight data recorder do?** | **German president warns of backlash against progress already made** |
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| The flight data recorder monitors a plane's altitude, airspeed and heading, according to the NTSB. Those factors are among at least 88 parameters that newly built planes must monitor. | In Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for stronger efforts to achieve equality and warned against tendencies to roll back progress already made. |
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| Some can collect the status of more than 1,000 other characteristics, from a wing's flap position to the smoke alarms. The NTSB said it can generate a computer animated video reconstruction of the flight from the information collected. | "Globally, we are seeing populist parties trying to create the impression that equality is something like a fixed idea of progressive forces," he said. He gave an example of " large tech companies that have long prided themselves on their modernity and are now, at the behest of a new American administration, setting up diversity programs and raving about a new 'masculine energy' in companies and society." |
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| NTBS investigators told the AP in 2014 that a flight data recorder carries 25 hours of information, including prior flights within that time span, which can sometimes provide hints about the cause of a mechanical failure on a later flight. An initial assessment of the data is provided to investigators within 24 hours, but analysis will continue for weeks more. | **Marchers in South America denounce femicides** |
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| **What are the origins of the black box?** | In South America, some of the marches were organized by groups protesting the killings of women known as femicides. |
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| At least two people have been credited with creating devices that record what happens on an airplane. | Hundreds of women in Ecuador marched through the streets of Quito to steady drumbeats and held signs that opposed violence and the "patriarchal system." |
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| One is French aviation engineer François Hussenot. In the 1930s, he found a way to record a plane's speed, altitude and other parameters onto photographic film, according to the website for European plane-maker Airbus. | "Justice for our daughters!" some demonstrators yelled in support of women slain in recent years. |
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| In the 1950s, Australian scientist David Warren came up with the idea for the cockpit voice recorder, according to his 2010 AP obituary. | In Bolivia, thousands of women began marching late Friday, with some scrawling graffiti on the walls of courthouses demanding that their rights be respected and denouncing impunity in femicides, with less than half of those cases reaching a sentencing. |
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| Warren had been investigating the crash of the world's first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, in 1953, and thought it would be helpful for airline accident investigators to have a recording of voices in the cockpit, the Australian Department of Defence said in a statement after his death. | Kirsten Grieshaber contributed to this report from Berlin. |
| | ===== How a canoe helped turn Hawaiian culture into a source of pride and even influenced Hollywood ===== |
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| Warren designed and constructed a prototype in 1956. But it took several years before officials understood just how valuable the device could be and began installing them in commercial airlines worldwide. Warren's father had been killed in a plane crash in Australia in 1934. | ---- |
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| **Why the name "black box"?** | {{:en:ecrit:ap25068028178507.jpg?300 |}} |
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| Some have suggested that it stems from Hussenot's device because it used film and "ran continuously in a light-tight box, hence the name 'black box,'" according to Airbus, which noted that orange was the box's chosen color from the beginning to make it easy to find. | By AUDREY McAVOY Associated Press |
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| Other theories include the boxes turning black when they get charred in a crash, the Smithsonian Magazine wrote in 2019. | KANEOHE, Hawaii (AP) — Hawaii's American colonizers once banned the Hawaiian language in schools. Some Native Hawaiians tried to lighten their skin with lye. Many people believed Polynesian voyagers had simply lucked into finding the islands by drifting on logs. |
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| "The truth is much more mundane," the magazine wrote. "In the post-World War II field of electronic circuitry, black box became the ubiquitous term for a self-contained electronic device whose input and output were more defining than its internal operations." | But a canoe launched half a century ago helped turn Hawaiian culture from a source of shame to one of pride, reviving the skill of traveling the seas by decoding the stars, waves and weather. That vessel — a double-hulled sailing canoe called the Hokulea, after the Hawaiian name for the star Arcturus — would even influence the Disney blockbuster "Moana" decades later. |
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| The media continues to use the term, the magazine wrote, "because of the sense of mystery it conveys in the aftermath of an air disaster." | To mark the anniversary, the Hokulea's early crew members gathered Saturday for ceremonial hula and kava drinking at the Oahu beach where the canoe launched on March 8, 1975, and where they began their first training sails. |
| ===== With home prices and mortgage rates high, many families find the American dream out of reach ===== | |
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| ---- | "It's a vehicle of exploration. It's a vehicle of discovery," Nainoa Thompson, the CEO of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, said in an interview. "It's also been our vehicle for justice as Native Hawaiians, as Pacific Islanders, as a very unique, special culture of the Earth." |
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| {{:en:ecrit:ap25028736162439.jpg?300 |}} | In 1980, Thompson became the first Hawaiian in six centuries to navigate to Tahiti without a compass or other modern instruments — a span of about 2,700 miles (4,300 kilometers). |
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| By R.J. RICO Associated Press | **Hawaiian culture had long been repressed** |
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| The Petersen family's two-bedroom apartment in northern California is starting to feel small. | Thompson, 71, remembers stories from his grandmother, born less than a decade after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. Teachers beat her for speaking Hawaiian, and her uncle tried to wash the brown off his skin with lye. |
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| Four-year-old Jerrik's toy monster trucks are everywhere in the 1,100-square-foot unit in Campbell, just outside of San Jose. And it's only a matter of time before 9-month-old Carolynn starts amassing more toys, adding to the disarray, says her mother, Jenn Petersen. | When she had children, she didn't teach them Hawaiian. |
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| The 42-year-old chiropractor had hoped she and her husband, Steve, a 39-year-old dental hygienist, would have bought a house by now. But when they can afford a bigger place, it will have to be another rental. Petersen has done the math: With mortgage rates and home prices stubbornly high, there's no way the couple, who make about $270,000 a year and pay about $2,500 in monthly rent, can afford a home anywhere in their area. | "If her children tried to be Hawaiian, they would get hurt in the new society," Thompson said. "And so you have to become something else." |
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| According to October data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, a San Jose family with a median income of $156,700 would need to spend 80% of their income on housing — including an $8,600 monthly mortgage payment — to own a median-priced $1.54 million home. That's far higher than the general rule of thumb that people should pay no more than 30% of their income on a mortgage or rent. | A resurgence of Hawaiian pride and identity starting in the late 1960s and 1970s set off a cultural renaissance. Artist Herb Kane began painting ancient canoes based on drawings from European explorers and got the idea to build a double-hulled canoe with tall, triangular sails similar to those his ancestors had used hundreds of years earlier. |
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| Moving out of state is out of the question for the Petersens — they have strong family ties to the area and their income would plummet if they move to a lower cost-of-living area. "I'm not willing to give up my job and close connections with my family for a house," Petersen said. | **Debunking the drifting log theory** |
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| The issue is widespread and near historic highs nationally: As of last fall, the median homeowner in the U.S. was paying 42% of their income on homeownership costs, according to the Atlanta Fed. Four years ago, that percentage was 28% and had not previously reached 38% since late 2007, just before the housing market crash. | At the time, many people accepted the notion that Polynesians settled islands by accident. |
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| "The American dream, as our parents knew it, doesn't exist anymore," Petersen said. "The whole idea that you get a house after you graduate college, get a steady job and get married? I've done most of those milestones. But the homeownership part? That just doesn't fit financially." | Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl had theorized that Polynesians arrived from South America, pushed west by the prevailing winds and currents. In 1947, he set out to prove it by floating from Peru on a log raft. He landed in the Tuamotu Islands north of Tahiti and wrote a best-seller. |
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| **First-time homeowners are getting older** | Heyerdahl's theory took hold even though Hawaiians for generations had passed down stories of people who traveled from the distant lands -- including Kahiki, possibly what is today known as Tahiti — by canoe, bringing with them edible plants such as ulu, or breadfruit. |
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| The same is true for an increasing number of American families. | Kane, University of Hawaii archaeologist Ben Finney and Honolulu surfer Tommy Holmes wanted to challenge the drifting log concept. They started the Polynesian Voyaging Society, intent on sailing a canoe to Tahiti without modern instruments. |
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| In 2024, the median first-time homebuyer was 38 years old, a jump from age 35 the previous year, according to a recent report by the National Association of Realtors. That's significantly above historic norms, when median first-time buyers hovered between 30 and 32 years old from 1993 to 2018. | They needed a navigator. Traditional long-distance voyaging skills had all but disappeared, but a Peace Corps volunteer on the isolated atoll of Satawal in Micronesia told them about Pius "Mau" Piailug, who had been taught navigation from childhood. Over about a month in 1976, Piailug guided the Hokulea from Hawaii to Tahiti — about the same distance from Hawaii to California. |
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| The biggest driver of this trend, experts said, is simple: There are far too few houses on the market to match pent-up demand, driving prices past the point of affordability for many people who are relatively early in their careers. Coupled with high mortgage rates, many have concluded that renting is their only option. | Some 17,000 people thronged the Tahitian shore to greet them and witness what one crew member called "the spaceship of our ancestors." |
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| "Wage growth hasn't kept up with the increase in home prices and interest rates," said Domonic Purviance, who studies housing at the Atlanta Fed. "Even though people are making more money, home prices are increasing at a faster rate." | Former Hawaii Gov. John Waihe'e was in his 20s then, and a delegate to the 1978 state Constitutional Convention. The Hokulea's success spurred delegates to make Hawaiian an official state language even though few residents still spoke it, he said. They also created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to improve the well-being of Native Hawaiians. |
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| That gap has left many out of the housing market, which for generations has been a way for Americans to build equity and wealth that they can pass down or leverage to buy a larger home. It's also led to widespread worries about housing in the U.S. About 7 in 10 voters under age 45 said they were "very" concerned about the cost of housing in their community, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters in the 2024 election. | "It helped us believe in everything that we were doing," Waihe'e said. |
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| **Is the dream of homeownership going to fade?** | Today, two dozen schools have Hawaiian language immersion programs, and Census data show more than 27,000 people in Hawaii, and 34,000 in the U.S., speak Hawaiian at home. |
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| Brian McCabe, a sociology professor at Georgetown University, said he frequently tells his students that "there are few things that all Americans agree on, but one of them is that they'd rather own a home than rent." | **Bringing dignity to the elders** |
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| McCabe said homeownership, especially as a wealth-building tool, is the right move for many, especially if the owner intends to be in one place for a long time. But he also said many are realizing that not owning a home has its advantages, too — it gives people more flexibility to move and allows them to live in exciting neighborhoods they would not be able to afford to buy property in. | In 1978, an ill-prepared crew set out for Tahiti in poor weather, and the Hokulea capsized just hours after leaving port. Crew member Eddie Aikau paddled his surfboard to get help. The Coast Guard rescued the canoe, but Aikau was never found. |
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| McCabe said millennials are getting married later, having children later, have a stronger desire to stay in cities and, especially due to remote work, value the flexibility of being able to move with ease — all of which he said could prompt an end to the notion that homeownership is the "apex of the American dream." | The voyaging society overhauled itself in response, setting clear goals and training requirements. Thompson studied at a Honolulu planetarium and spent over a year under the tutelage of Piailug. In 1980, he navigated to Tahiti. |
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| "The big question is whether we see the sheen of homeownership start to fade," McCabe said. "It's such an interesting cultural marker: Why is owning a home the pinnacle for so many people?" | Thompson said he felt a deep obligation to fulfill Aikau's wish to follow the path of his ancestors and "pull Tahiti out of the sea." But he didn't celebrate when the Hokulea got there. |
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| It's a question Petersen wrestles with because she knows any three-bedroom home she found in her area would leave her family "house poor." | "I just went into a quiet, dark place and just told Eddie we pulled it out of the sea," Thompson said. "There's no high fives. It's too profound." |
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| "I used to subscribe to the idea that owning a house is just a natural milestone you have to reach," she said. "At some point, though, what are you sacrificing by just owning a house and gaining equity? I want to be able to travel with my kids. I want to be able to sign them up for extracurriculars. How are we supposed to do that if we're paying a mortgage that's most of our take-home pay?" | In decades since, the society has sailed the canoe around the Pacific and world, including New Zealand, Japan, South Africa and New York. |
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| Petersen said she'll "always hold out a little bit of hope" that homeownership will be in her family's future. But if they find a townhouse to rent that has space for her kids and fits within their $3,600 monthly rental budget? | It inspired other Pacific Island communities to revive or newly appreciate their own wayfinding traditions. |
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| "I'd take that," she said. | In Rapa Nui, Chile — also known as Easter Island — islanders have embarked on long-distance canoe voyages. The University of Guam has a navigation program. Similar trends have surfaced in the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Samoa and Tonga, said Mary Therese Perez Hattori, the director of the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center. |
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| **Some cities are providing crucial aid to first-time homebuyers** | "We come from very, very ancient societies," said Hattori, who is Chamorro, the Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands. "Hokulea sort of helped us remind the world of this." |
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| Lifelong Boston resident Julieta Lopez, 63, spent decades hoping to buy a home but watched as prices became increasingly out of reach. | **Hollywood makes a blockbuster** |
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| "The prices in Boston just got higher and higher and higher and higher," said Lopez, who works for the city traffic department issuing tickets for parking violations. | Hokulea's influence spread in 2016 when Disney released "Moana," an animated film about a 16-year-old girl who learns wayfinding about 3,000 years ago. |
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| Two years ago, furious to learn that her subsidized apartment's monthly rent was being hiked to $2,900, Lopez, who earns about $60,000 annually, took out her phone and began searching for government programs that help first-time homebuyers. She was determined to finally own her own place. | Thompson spoke to hundreds on the movie's creative team about wayfinding and the importance of canoes to Pacific culture, said Aaron Kandell, a Hawaii-born writer who worked on the movie. |
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| Within months, she had succeeded. Lopez qualified to receive $50,000 from the local Massachusetts Affordable Homeownership Alliance nonprofit and another $50,000 from the city of Boston's Office of Housing — funds that helped her with a down payment on the $430,000 two-bedroom condominium she shares with her 30-year-old son. She now pays about $2,160 a month on her mortgage. | Kandell, who is not Native Hawaiian, spent a year studying navigation with the Polynesian Voyaging Society during his 20s and incorporated that into the script, including where Moana learns to use her outstretched hand to track the stars and runs her hand in the ocean to feel the currents. |
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| Lopez knows she is lucky the city has placed such a focus on aiding first-time buyers like herself — Boston has poured more than $24 million into its homeownership assistance programs since Mayor Michelle Wu took office in 2021, helping nearly 700 residents get their first homes. | Crew members taught animators about coconut fiber ropes so they would look right when Moana pulls on them, Kandell said. |
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| But Lopez also feels proud to have her own place after years of working so hard — jobs that included everything from telecommunications to health care to electronics. | The Polynesian Voyaging Society's initial plan was to sail to Tahiti once, supporting a documentary, book and research papers. Thompson remembers pushing Hokulea's hull into the water with the crew back in 1975. |
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| "I was determined to have my piece of the pie," she said. "I felt I deserved that. I've always worked. Always. Nonstop." | "It was really a moment — I didn't recognize it — but this was going to change everything," he said. |
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