Guangzhou Plans Elevator Black Box Popularizatio

People's Daily 2006.10.20.
Huang Liniao reports

    Specialists from Guangzhou special device supervise and inspection institute told us that Guangzhou municipal government planed to install the black box in most of city’s elevators to improve their running security factor.

    The statistic shows that there are all together 211 cases of elevator running accident in China last year, which caused 196 dead. The institute invented this elevator black box, namely the elevator running data recorder, in reference to the airplane black box, a special name for flight security state recorder. When there are elevator malfunctions like passenger trapping, sliding, rushing to the top etc, the maintenance technicians will receive warning messages sent by the black box and will initiate the salvation operation immediately. They also can find the malfunction parts or causes by reading the recorded data information, so that they can eliminate the malfunctions and hidden risks in time.

    Apart from malfunction warning function, the black box also has the functions of accident prevention and self-test. The institute has got state patent for this black box. The black box has been put in use in some elevators for testing, and has been proved useful. It has been ratified by the users and the science and technology departments.