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A black box recorder recovered from a Ukrainian passenger jet that was incorrectly shot by Iran captured in January took a call in the cockpit moments after a missile strike, officials say.
Data from the Boeing 737 indicated that the pilots and passengers were alive before a second missile struck 25 seconds later, Iran’s air traffic control said.
The flight of Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) crashed shortly after the departure of Tehran.
All 176 people on board were killed.
After initially denying all responsibility for the incident, Iran acknowledged that it had “inadvertently” killed the UIA flight, calling it a “disastrous mistake” by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.
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Iran’s air defenses were on high alert at the time. Hours earlier, the country had fired ballistic missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq in retaliation for the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad.
What’s the latest on the crash?
During a press conference on Sunday, Captain Zanganeh, head of the Civil Aviation Organization of Iran (CAOI), said “up to 19 seconds” of conversation between two pilots and a pilot instructor was taken prisoner in the cabin of the plane after the first missile struck.
It was “25 seconds later that the second rocket hit the plane,” he said, adding, “They piloted the plane until the last moment.”
He said information captured by the plane’s black boxes – which contained important data and communications from the cockpit – indicated that the plane had been “in a normal flight corridor” before the first missile exploded, sending scrapers into the plane.
Capt. Zanganeh added: “At the moment the aircraft has an electrical problem and the aircraft’s auxiliary force is switched on at the behest of the pilot instructor. Both engines were on in the seconds after the explosion.
“At that moment, no sound was heard from the passenger house … The recording stopped after 19 seconds.”
No details about the cockpit conversation were revealed.
Copyright
Reuters
The restored flight recorder of Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) Flight PS752
Iran had delayed release of the plane’s “black box” voice recorder, but sent it to France in July for investigation.
No other parties involved in the analysis of the black box have yet to comment.
What happened to Flight PS752?
On January 8, at 06:12 local time (02:42 GMT), UIA flight PS752 departed from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.
The aircraft was a Boeing 737-800 – one of the most widely used aircraft models of the international aviation industry.
Before leaving the airspace of the airport, it turned out that the plane turned around to return to the runway. Shortly afterwards, it crashed.
The government in Tehran first said that the UIA aircraft had suffered a technical problem shortly after take-off. It quoted witnesses including the crew of another passenger plane who said it was prior to the fire.
Authorities said they had lost radar contact when the plane was at an altitude of 2,400m, minutes after boarding.
A later report from the CAOI said that the air defense unit that directed the passenger plane had recently moved and failed to calibrate its equipment correctly. As a result, the civilian aircraft was incorrectly identified as an enemy object.
The report also said the rocket battery could not communicate with its command center, and had shot at the plane without receiving official approval.
