The navy yesterday recovered China Airlines' Hong Kong-bound CI611's flight data recorder and sent it along with the cockpit voice recorder to Taipei to aid in the investigation of the May 25 crash.
According to the Cabinet's Aviation Safety Council (ASC), the naval rescue crew found the flight data recorder, one of the two "black boxes" on board the 747-200 jumbo jet, at around 7:30am yesterday morning, successfully recovering it from the sea about an hour later.
PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
ASC officials said that the flight data recorder was dented during the crash but that it did not appear to be significantly damaged.
The other "black box," the cockpit voice recorder, was recovered by the navy on Tuesday.
"The location where the rescue crew found the flight data recorder was about 300m away from the site where they found the cockpit voice recorder on Tuesday," said Kay Yong (戎凱), the ASC's managing director. "Both of the `black boxes' will be analyzed by the ASC and we will try to finish the job as soon as possible."
ASC Spokeswoman Tracy Jen (任靜怡) said that researchers will have to clean the "black boxes," tear them apart and then dry them before their data can be processed.
"They have lots of work to do," she said. "If the `black boxes' are not damaged inside, it will take us about five to seven days to finish our rough investigation and analysis of them. If they are damaged inside, we'll need more time."
The ``black boxes'' were put in water in order to minimize the deterioration of their data records.
Meanwhile, China Airlines reportedly disagreed with the findings of a probe into its 1999 crash in Hong Kong, prompting Hong Kong officials to say yesterday that they would order a review of the accident report.
The China Airlines MD11 that flew in from Bangkok flipped over while landing during a tropical storm, bursting into flames and killing three people.
A probe into the accident is reported to have concluded that the main cause of the crash was the pilot's inability to stop the jet's descent.
But officials will take a further look into the findings in what Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department Spokeswoman Grace Ng said was the first such review in Hong Kong aviation history.
China Airlines executives have said previously they did not agree with some of the Hong Kong investigators' findings, but they have not publicly stated their objections.
There was no immediate comment from the airline yesterday.
Ng said Hong Kong law provides for reviews of airline accident reports if there are objections by anyone whose reputations could be harmed. The reviews are to be conducted in public, unless officials decide there is a reason to keep them private.
Ng said she could not provide any details about the accident report, including details as to who had sought to review the report, which has been distributed to China Airlines and others involved.
The South China Morning Post yesterday said the report concluded that the airplane crashed when the Italian pilot, Gerardo Lettich, failed to stop its descent on Aug. 22, 1999.
It quoted the report as saying that the pilot should have applied more thrust to counteract head-winds blowing near Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok airport.
But China Airlines executives believe that weather resembling a small tornado might have caused the jet to flip over, the Post said.
The newspaper did not quote the airline executives by name.
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