Air India crash: India awaits answers as AAIB decodes black box of the aircraft
The decoding of the black box (Digital Flight Data Recorder) of the crashed London-bound Air India plane, by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), will offer a clear and indepth insight into what happened during and moments before the accident, Union Minister of Civil Aviation Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said on Saturday.
AAIB investigators, on Friday, had recovered one of the two black boxes of the aircraft from the rooftop of the building onto which the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner (AI171) had crashed. The black box will help reconstruct the ill-fated flight's final moments and is crucial to determining how the disaster occurred.
In modern aircraft, there are two black boxes—Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR). Painted in bright orange, DFDRs are treated with reflex material for high visibility and securely connected with automatically activated signalisation for localisation underwater.
DFDR is usually located in the tail section of an aircraft. The tail cone of the crashed Air India aircraft was lodged near the top of the building.
"...the AAIB team believes that this decoding of the black box is going to give indepth insight into what would have actually happened during the process of the crash or moments before the crash itself. We are also eagerly waiting for the results or the report once the AAIB goes through its full investigation," the minister was quoted as saying.
Expressing condolences for the families of the victims, the minister said the last two days have been difficult. He said he rushed to the site to oversee what needs to be done after learning about the accident. "Once we rushed to the site, we already saw the response teams from all the concerned departments were working on ground, actively trying to rescue whatever is possible, trying to cut down the fire and to move the debris so that the bodies can be sent to the hospital at the earliest," the minister added.
Secretary of the Ministry of Civil Aviation Samir Kumar Sinha gave a rundown of the accident saying "On 12th June around 2PM, we received the information that the plane going from Ahmedabad to Gatwick London had crashed. We immediately got detailed information about this through ATC Ahmedabad. This was an AIC 171 and there were a total of 242 people on board, including 230 passengers, 2 pilots and 10 crew members. This plane took off at 1:39 pm and within a few seconds, after reaching a height of about 650 feet, it started sinking, i.e., it started losing height."
"At 1:39 pm, the pilot informed Ahmedabad ATC that it was a May Day, i.e., full emergency. According to ATC, when it tried to contact the plane, it did not receive any response. Exactly after one minute, this plane crashed in Medhaninagar, which is located at a distance of about 2 km from the airport. The captain of the plane was Sumit Sabharwal and the first officer was Clive Sundar."
Meanwhile, the death toll in the Air India plane tragedy touched 270 on Saturday. The authorities had earlier pegged the death toll at 265.
India