The search is over

The second flight recorder of an Armenian plane was recovered from the bottom of the Black Sea

Last night, at the site of the crash of the Armenian Airlines A320 plane, the second flight recorder of this airbus was recovered from the bottom of the Black Sea. Let us recall that the airliner, operating on May 3 from Yerevan to Sochi, crashed and sank in the sea 6 km from the coast while landing at Sochi airport. Everyone on this flight - 105 passengers and eight crew members - died.

The first "black box" of the Airbus, a voice recorder that recorded conversations between crew members, was discovered and raised to the surface from a depth of 500 meters on Monday. The second “black box”, which recorded the operating parameters of the aircraft’s units and systems, was found at the bottom 16 meters from the place where the voice recorder was found on Tuesday at 23.45. Then, within an hour, the RT-1000 deep-sea robotic manipulator, with the help of which a unique operation to search and lift “black boxes” was carried out, surfaced, holding the recorder with its mechanical “hand”. Yesterday morning, the sea tug "Navigator" (a robotic manipulator was lowered to the bottom from this vessel) with a parametric recorder on board arrived at the port of Sochi.

Yesterday in Sochi, the chairman of the Russian government commission to investigate the crash of the Armenian Airlines airbus, the Russian Minister of Transport Igor Levitin and the chairman of the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) Tatyana Anodina told reporters that the parametric recorder ended up at the bottom in a crevice and was covered by a thick layer of dense silt more than a meter. That's why they looked for him for so long. According to Ms. Anodina, yesterday it was finally decided that the records of both recorders would be decrypted at the IAC, but with the participation of specialists from the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis of Aviation Accidents (BEA) and the Airbus concern, as well as safety inspectors from the General Directorate of Civil Aviation of Armenia. As Tatyana Anodina said, both “black boxes” were damaged when the plane crashed, and water from the Black Sea depths, in which hydrogen sulfide is dissolved in high concentrations, got into their bodies. The voice recorder recorded on film, and it suffered greatly as a result of exposure to an aggressive environment. The recording in the parametric recorder was made on the hard drive, and the chances that it saved the data are much greater. When asked when the recorder information could be deciphered, Ms. Anodina said that this work could last “quite a long time.”

The IAC technical commission has now completed the analysis of all ground-based means of objective control - recordings of crew conversations with dispatchers and Sochi airport locator readings, but they did not contain information on the basis of which the cause of the death of the Armavia A320 aircraft could be named. The cause of the plane crash, experts hope, will be determined after deciphering the black box recordings.

Igor GLANIN, Sochi