Indian investigators have successfully retrieved data from the black boxes of a Boeing plane, after it crashed in one of the deadliest air disasters in decades, the government said Thursday.
All but one of the 242 people on board the Air India flight were killed on June 12 when the jet crashed in the western city of Ahmedabad, where at least 19 others were left dead.
Two weeks after the disaster, the civil aviation ministry said investigators have started “the data extraction process” from the plane’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders.
“The analysis… is underway. These efforts aim to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the accident and identify contributing factors to enhance aviation safety and prevent future occurrences,” a ministry statement said.
The two black boxes were found within days of the crash, but were only flown to the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau in New Delhi on Tuesday.
One of the victims’ relatives said they were waiting for answers.
“For now, all we know is the plane took off and then fell. How? Why? Nobody knows. And we want to know. We deserve to know,” said Imtiyaz Ali, whose brother was on the plane with his wife and two children.
“I refuse to believe that our aviation sector is this bad that we still don’t have even a slight indication about what went wrong,” he told AFP on Wednesday.
Air India said last week that the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner was “well-maintained” and that the pilots were accomplished flyers.
Investigators have recovered more than 100 mobile phones with the aim of retrieving any recordings that “may provide clues about the final moments of the flight”, Ahmedabad police commissioner GS Malik said last week.
The plane was being reconstructed at an undisclosed location “to detect any signs of mechanical failure, structural faults, or explosions”, he told journalists.
