Black box found,may be sent to US for decoding

The hunt for black box took three days with the plane crashing in a deep valley below the cliff on which the Bagpe airport is located,making the investigators term the site as an unprecedented crash terrain.

While the search team was shown images of a DFDR that was orange in colour and rectangular in shape,the crash split the DFDR into two and made its appearance black.

One part of the DFDR was found on Sunday but it did not contain the crucial memory module that records the flight data for 25 hours,which will provide data on nearly 200 parameters and help pinpoint the cause of the crash. On Tuesday morning,we found the remaining portion of the DFDR amid the debris with its memory module safe, senior avionics engineers,involved in the search operations,said on Tuesday.

The process of dowloading the digital information stored in the memory module is expected to be a delicate process and could involve sending it to the makers of DFDR in the United States.

If the DFDR was not damaged,the data could have been acquired in Mumbai itself. But now it will be taken to Delhi and probably sent to the US for decoding, engineers said.

Normally,the DFDR arms itself when a plane is flying at over 9.8 G-force. In this case the crash occurred after touchdown,so there was no G-force and the DFDR was not armed. Had it been armed,it would have sent out signals through which we could have traced it quickly, the officials said.

DGCA had on Monday considered using a sonar detector that picks up sound signals from DFDRs. We decided otherwise as the sonar emitter gets armed only on contact with sea water, officials added.

The black box of the Boeing 737-800 was the last missing piece of evidence that the DGCA was looking for at the crash site. A damaged cockpit voice recorder,a digital flight data acquisition system and the aircrafts throttle were recovered earlier from the crash site.

US transportation safety board team joins probe

Mangalore: Officials from the US National Transportation Safety Board,which investigates crashes involving US aircraft manufacturers,joined Boeing officials on Tuesday in studying the 06/24 runway where the crash occurred as well as the final path of the Air India Express IX 812 and its crash site. 

An NTSB communique said senior air safety investigator Joe Sedor was the US accredited representative in the Mangalore investigation. He would be assisted by a US team comprising an NTSB flight operations specialist,an NTSB aircraft systems specialist and technical advisors from the US Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing. ens