Dr David Warren, the Australian inventor of the flight data recorder or more famously known as the 'black box', which investigators have largely relied on for decades in sifting clues to determine the cause of an airplane crash, is dead at 85.

According to a report by ABC, Dr Warren was the foremost research scientist at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation's Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne for more than 30 years and in 1953, the Department of Defence said that he headed the investigation of the world's airline disaster.

In the course of his ensuing numerous air crash investigations, Dr Warren advocated the use of voice recorders in Australian planes' cockpits, which eventually morphed into the world's pioneering black box prototype introduced in 1956, his wholly designed and constructed ARL.

The following decade saw the adoption of black boxes in all Australian cockpits as authorities mandated the gadgets installation, which were eventually installed too on passenger airlines and all forms of transport across the globe.

Dr Warren and his research team were conferred the Lawrence Hargraves award in 2001 for that pioneering achievement and by the following year, he was designated as an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia.

He left as a physical legacy a Qantas Airbus A380, which was named after him in 2008 and as his personal legacies, Dr Warren is survived by his wife Ruth, four children and seven grandchildren.