Air India mishap: More clarity on reason behind crash likely as second black box recovered

New Delhi: With the recovery of the second black box Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), investigators probing the Ahmedabad air crash are inching towards getting more clarity on what led to the June 12 incident involving Air India's Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft, officials said.

The authorities had earlier recovered the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) on June 13 evening from the rooftop of a medical college hostel near the Ahmedabad airport where the ill-fated aircraft had crash landed.

Officials on Sunday late evening said the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) have been "located and secured".

A Black Box is a machine that records information about the aircraft while on flight. While in some cases both CVR and DFDR are integrated to form a single black box, in most cases, CVR and DFDR are separate.

The CVR records sounds in the cockpit and conversations between the pilots, while DFDR records around 80 types of information like altitude, airspeed and flight heading among other things. Though called Black Box, it is orange or yellow in colour and rectangular in shape.

Usually, experts take around two weeks to decipher the data from the Black Box, which is made of steel or titanium and insulated from extreme heat and cold. Depending on the extent of damage to the black boxes, officials said it will be examined at Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau's (AAIB) state-of-the-art laboratory in Delhi or abroad.

The AAIB has already launched a detailed investigation and as per the Rule 3 of Aircraft (Investigation of Accidents and Incidents) Rules, 2017 the sole objective of the investigations carried out by AAIB is prevention of accidents and incidents and not to apportion blame or liability. The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is also conducting a parallel probe under international protocols since the aircraft is American-made.