Pakistan experts return from France with evidence extracted from crashed plane's blackbox

A team of Pakistani experts has returned from France with the evidence extracted from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders of the PIA aircraft that crashed in a densely populated area last month in Karachi, officials said on Monday.

The French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) on Friday last said the downloading and decoding of the black box of the Airbus A-320 aircraft have been completed.

Yannick Malinge, the chief product safety officer at Airbus, also informed the Pakistani authorities that the flight data and the cockpit voice recorders have been analysed and listened to, officials said.

The aircraft of the national carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) crashed minutes before landing on May 22, killing 97 out of 99 people on board. Ninety-seven passengers died in the crash. Eleven people on the ground were injured. A 13-year-old girl who was injured on the ground died last week, taking the death toll in the accident to 98.

Following the mishap, Pakistan set up a two-member probe team led by Air Commodore Usman Ghani. The team was in France to get the decoded data from the French investigators.

According to PIA officials, the team was back in Karachi with the vital data, which it will use to finalise the preliminary findings.

The government has already announced that it would table the report in Parliament and would share the findings with the public on June 22.

An 11-member team of experts from an Airbus facility in the French city of Toulouse was in Pakistan after the incident to conduct an independent probe into the crash involving its aircraft.

The experts team last week left for the French city of Le Bourget, taking with them the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) -- the two components of the PK-8303 black box.

The Pakistani experts accompanied the French investigators and the devices were decoded in their presence.

The FDR records time, altitude, airspeed, heading, and aircraft attitude and other in-flight characteristics. The CVR is a device used to record the audio environment in the flight deck for accidents and incident investigation purposes. It records and stores the audio signals of the microphones and earphones of the pilots' headsets and of an area microphone installed in the cockpit.

On June 2, Pakistan's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in a letter to the national carrier said the pilot of the crashed aircraft did not follow the instructions of the air traffic controller (ATC).

The letter, which was published in Pakistani media, has reportedly irked the government which said that such information should be provided to the inquiry board already set up to probe the crash.