David Warren (inventor)

On 20 March 2021, Google showed a Doodle on its home page in some countries for David Warren's 96th birthday.

On 25 March 2014, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation renamed their Canberra headquarters the "David Warren Building".

David Warren was inducted into the Australian Aviation Hall of Fame on 16 November 2013.

In June 2012, the ACT Government named a road, David Warren Road, in the suburb of Hume.

Warren died on 19 July 2010, aged 85, in Melbourne. He was buried in a casket bearing the label "Flight Recorder Inventor; Do Not Open" (a play off of the "FLIGHT RECORDER DO NOT OPEN" label on his recorders).

In November 2008, Qantas named one of their Airbus A380s after Warren in honour of his services to aviation.

Warren received many awards and honours, including The Australian Institute of Energy Medal (1999), the Hartnett Medal of the Royal Society of the Arts (2000), the Centenary Medal (2001), the Lawrence Hargrave Award of the Royal Aeronautical Society (2001), Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) (2002), and the ICAO Edward Warner Award (2016).

Warren was the chair of the Combustion Institute (Aust & NZ Section) for 25 years (1958–83), the founding chair of the Morris Minor Car Club of Victoria (1977-2002), as well as committee member of the Chemical Society, the Institute of Fuel, and the Australian Institute of Energy.

Warren worked at what are now the Defence Science and Technology Organisation's Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne from 1952 to 1983, rising to the level of principal research scientist. While there, he came up with the idea for the cockpit voice recorder while investigating a crash of the world's first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, in 1953, after seeing a miniature voice recorder at a trade show. "If a businessman had been using one of these in the plane and we could find it in the wreckage and we played it back, we'd say, 'We know what caused this.'", Warren later recalled. "Any sounds that were relevant to what was going on would be recorded and you could take them from the wreckage."

Warren was born to Rev Hubert and Ellie Warren and had three siblings. He was born on a remote mission station on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory, the first white child born on the island. He was educated at Launceston Church Grammar School and Trinity Grammar School, New South Wales. His father died in the crash of the de Havilland D.H.86 Miss Hobart over the Bass Strait in 1934.

David Ronald de Mey Warren AO (20 March 1925 – 19 July 2010) was an Australian scientist, best known for inventing and developing the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (also known as FDR, CVR and "the black box").