After every crash the news talks about the hunt for the black box, the sealed recorder that holds the final minutes of data and cockpit audio. The name does all the imagining for you: a small, ominous black cube buried in the wreckage. We have all pictured it.
They are bright orange. Sometimes a near-fluorescent 'international orange', specifically so search teams can spot them in a smouldering debris field or on the sea floor, with reflective strips and an underwater locator beacon to boot. There are two of them on a typical airliner, a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, and neither is a box you would call black. Theories vary on the name. Some trace it to early electronic gear being called black boxes, some to the charring at crash sites, some to a journalist's turn of phrase. The aviation safety bodies that actually use them, like Australia's ATSB, will tell you plainly: the colour is orange, and has been for decades. The scary black cube lives only in your head and the headlines.