Dubai - Zaiko later told a Russian FM station that the black box was recording flight parameters until the very moment the Boeing 737-800 hit the ground.
Published: Mon 21 Mar 2016, 1:35 PM
Last updated: Tue 22 Mar 2016, 12:48 AM
A flight data recorder from the crashed flydubai passenger has been opened and authorities said records found to be of good quality.
"The flight data recorder has been opened and a damaged cable has been repaired," Sergei Zaiko, chief of the Interstate Aviation Committee, revealed to Russian news agency TASS.
"The memory module of the data recorder was tested and switched on. Data from it has been copied and its quality has been assessed as good," the news agency quoted Zaiko, who is heading the crash probe from the Russian side, as saying late Sunday.
Zaiko later told a Russian FM station that the black box was recording flight parameters until the very moment the Boeing 737-800 hit the ground.
Soon after the crash, investigators recovered the crashed plane's Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) known as Black Boxes. Aviation experts were of the opinion that since the flight records were severely damaged it is unlikely the cockpit voice and data recorders from the crashed jet will yield much information. Russia's airline regulator said it could take up to a month to decode the information.
Saj Ahmad, chief analyst at Strategic Aero Research, said flight data and cockpit voice recorders are built to a high degree of robustness, but technology exists today to extract data now and it doesn't matter how much damaged occurred to these devices.
"Given the rapid recovery of these units, it will still take time before anything can be made public - certainly in terms of cockpit conversations or the flight profile prior to impact. And of course, this will determine how quickly or otherwise an initial crash report could be compiled. We're probably looking at a good few weeks before anything is known publicly," Ahmad told Khaleej Times on Monday from London.
"The recorder data has information right up to the point of the crash, there is a very good chance that the investigators have a full picture of what happened and why," he added.
Apart from Russian team, the black boxes are being viewed by experts from the UAE, France and the US, since the American-made Boeing plane had French-made engines.
The UAE investigation team now in Russia is led by the accredited representative and two investigators from the Air Accident Investigation Sector in the General Civil Aviation Authority. The team has been joined by the head of the Russian team in downloading the black boxes.
Initially, the IAC team at the crash site in Rostov-on-Don, which is 950 kilometers south of Moscow near the Ukrainian border, presented three versions of the cause of the tragedy: a technical fault, severe weather conditions and human error.
Unconfirmed security footage on Russian state television appeared to show the jet plummeting nose first into the ground at high speed before exploding. The powerful explosion left a big crater in the runway.
issacjohn@khaleejtimes.com
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