Indian authorities said they had found the flight data recorder of the Air India plane that crashed, killing hundreds of people, as teams at the site continued to sift through wreckage on Saturday.
Data extracted from an aircraft’s so-called black boxes is crucial in investigations of aviation accidents, and the flight data recorder can give insight into details such as timing, altitude and airspeed.
“The decoding of this black box is going to give in-depth insight into what would have actually happened during the process of the crash, or moments before the crash,” India’s civil aviation minister, Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, said in a news conference on Saturday.
The aviation ministry previously announced late Friday that the government had formed a high-level investigative committee that would focus on “preventing and handling such occurrences in the future.”
Flight AI171, bound for London’s Gatwick Airport, crashed moments after takeoff from Ahmedabad, in India’s western state of Gujarat. There was only one survivor from the 242 onboard, and dozens of people on the ground were also killed.
In a sign of the alarm caused by the crash, India’s aviation regulators ordered Air India on Friday to carry out “additional maintenance actions” on its Boeing 787 fleet. The aviation minister said there were 34 such planes in India, eight of which had already undergone the new inspections. He said the rest would be inspected “with immediate urgency.”
It could be months before a definitive explanation emerges, but videos of the accident and other evidence have begun to offer clues about what might have brought down the plane. Among the initial questions: whether the plane’s wing flaps and slats were properly extended, and why the landing gear, which creates drag, remained down.
Distraught relatives waited at Ahmedabad’s Civil Hospital, the city’s main medical facility, to claim the bodies of their loved ones for funerals. By late Friday, fewer than a dozen bodies had been released, as medical staff ran DNA tests to determine identities.
Rafeek Abdul Aziz Ahmed, who was among the relatives at the hospital, said that his nephew, who had been working as a hotel manager in London, died in the crash along with his wife and their two young children. Mr. Ahmed said the wait was becoming excruciating, as the government had not said when the bodies might be released.
“I want to know where the two small children are,” he said, standing outside the center where workers were collecting DNA samples from the relatives. “My nephew and his family came to visit me. What will I tell their relatives in London?”
Medical workers at the facility said that what made the job hard was not just the sheer number of samples that had to be collected to identify the remains of 270 victims, but that in many cases, body parts had to be painstakingly pieced together before they could be released to families.
“For two nights now, without sleep, our teams have been working to swiftly match the DNAs of all the families,” said Harsh Sanghavi, the home minister for Gujarat, where Ahmedabad is located.
On its way down, the plane skidded into the buildings of a medical college near the airport, its tail striking a dining hall where dozens of medical students and junior doctors had been having lunch. On Saturday, a crane was still trying to extract the tail of the aircraft from the badly damaged building, and rescuers pulled out another body from the wreckage.
Late Friday, the site remained cordoned off after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited to survey the wreckage. Earth-moving machinery was clearing debris as students from the college came out carrying personal belongings like books and clothing that they had retrieved. Many said they had spent the night elsewhere, in hotels.
While the death toll among the passengers was clear by the end of Thursday, the day the plane went down, exactly how many on the ground died in the impact and fire caused by the crash is still uncertain. The government has remained tight-lipped, but security officials at the site and medical doctors say as many as three dozen people were probably killed in addition to those onboard the plane. The official death toll stands at 270.
Pragati K.B. is a reporter for The Times based in New Delhi, covering news from across India.
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
Suhasini Raj is a reporter based in New Delhi who has covered India for The Times since 2014.
The post Data Recorder Is Found for Air India Plane That Crashed appeared first on New York Times.
