Mangalore black box taken to US

Sources in the Civil Aviation Ministry told Deccan Herald over phone that a three-member team, headed by Air Marshal (retd) Bhushan Nilkanth Gokhale, who heads the CoI, S N Dwivedi, who is Director of Airworthiness in the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), and is also secretary to the CoI, and an operations expert Capt Ron Nagar, left for the US a few days ago.

The team is expected to return to Delhi on July 1 along with transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder and retrieved data from the digital flight data recorder (DFDR), also known as black box. The DFDR was recovered from the crash site on May 25 but DGCA said it was in a “very, very bad condition”.

The sources said once the data from the chip inside the black box is recovered, the CoI will take a view on having them analysed by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) or Boeing, which is the manufacturer of the aircraft. “That decision will be taken once the team returned and preferred to have the data analysed by either the NTSB or Boeing,” the source said.

DGCA sources said the CoI felt it necessary to take the black box to its manufacturer because “the DFDR was badly burnt from the outside”. A senior official said that since the equipment, but not the chip contained inside it, is not crash-proof, the CoI took the decision to have the data retrieved from the chip.

“The chip will have to be played on another identical instrument, a process which can be done by the black box manufacturer,” a DGCA official said.

DGCA officials close to the CoI investigation said there is a possibility that the crash may not entirely have been because of pilot error.

Once Air Marshal Gokhale returns from the US, the CoI will “listen” and “correlate” the tapes of the Mangalore Air Traffic Control (ATC) and the pilot. “Correlating the two sets of tapes will establish whether the crash occurred because of pilot error or a combination of factors,” sources said.