'Recovered black box of crashed plane being decoded in Beijing lab'
Beijing: The recovered black box containing the cockpit voice recorder of the Chinese passenger plane which crashed on Monday is being decoded at a laboratory in Beijing and the data downloading and analysis work is underway, a top Chinese aviation official said on Thursday.
The black box, which was damaged, was sent to a laboratory in Beijing for analysis on Wednesday night, said Zhu Tao, head of the aviation safety office of the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
The possibility that the data storage unit of the cockpit voice recorder was damaged cannot be ruled out at present, Zhu told reporters in Nanning.
The rescuers are going all out to locate the second black box or the flight-data recorder, the state-run news agency Xinhua quoted Zhu as saying.
The Boeing 737-800 plane with 132 people on board crashed on Monday in a village in Tengxian County in the city of Wuzhou. No survivors have been found so far. One black box from the plane has been recovered.
Black box is a recording device used by aviation investigators to analyse the events leading to the air mishap
Cockpit voice recorders can capture voices, audio alerts and background sounds from the engine or switches being moved. The flight data recorder stores information about speed, altitude and direction, as well as pilot actions and performance of important systems.
The data of the Cockpit Voice Recorder was awaited keenly as China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 sharply dropped from an altitude of 29,100 feet to 9,075 feet in just two minutes and 15 seconds, crashing into a mountainous area. On Thursday, pieces of engine wreckage from the crashed passenger plane have been found.
The main impact point of the plane crash has been basically determined, Zhu said, adding that most of the plane wreckage was scattered within a radius of about 30 metres of the main impact point and the depth from the surface extends to about 20 metres underground. So far, a total of 183 pieces of aircraft wreckage, some remains of victims and 21 pieces of belongings of victims have been found and handed over to the investigation team, said Zheng Xi, head of the fire brigade of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
