FRANCE-CRASH/BEA Investigators say have cockpit voice recordings from crashed Airbus
Record ID:
383591
FRANCE-CRASH/BEA Investigators say have cockpit voice recordings from crashed Airbus
- Title: FRANCE-CRASH/BEA Investigators say have cockpit voice recordings from crashed Airbus
- Date: 25th March 2015
- Summary: LE BOURGET, FRANCE (MARCH 25, 2015) (REUTERS) EXTERIOR BEA VARIOUS OF JOURNALISTS AND MEDIA WAITING FOR NEWS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (French) BEA DIRECTOR REMI JOUTY SAYING: "It's a mountainous site, very rugged. Access is very difficult because it is far from any road and because it is steep terrain on which one cannot easily walk and so which needs precautions to get there and to move around. So the conditions are very difficult. As you can see, the plane impacted side of the mountain at a high speed and energy. The plane disintegrated and dispersed and the pieces are of a very small size." JOURNALISTS (SOUNDBITE) (French) BEA DIRECTOR REMI JOUTY SAYING: "The plane followed this route, which corresponded to the planned route. The next waypoint was IRMAR, situated here. So it was heading in the right direction. It was at its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Around 0930, the last message transmitted by the aircraft to the control centre with which the plane was in contact was a routine message that confirmed the air traffic control instruction clearing it to proceed towards waypoint IRMAR, up there. About a minute later, the trajectory from the ATC show that the plane began a descent and that this descent continued to impact as the last radar position is very close to the impact point. The descent lasted about 10 minutes. The last altitude recorded by radars is very close to the impact point. The altitude at the time was a little over 6,000 feet -- a little over the average altitude of the impact site. That means that the radar followed the plane until impact." CAMERAMAN (SOUNDBITE) (French) BEA DIRECTOR REMI JOUTY SAYING: "Work on the memory module began immediately after it arrived here. And it continued all day. We had some difficulties to read them. But, what I told you at the start, as it was important and a big relief for us, we just have been able to extract a useable audio data file. We have a usable audio file. We know it relates to that flight. But it is far too early to draw any conclusion as to what happened. There will now be work on the file to understand and interpret the sounds and the voice that can be heard." JOURNALISTS IN NEWS CONFERENCE
- Embargoed: 9th April 2015 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: France
- Country: France
- Topics: General
- Reuters ID: LVA5ZX7PQMAFFO3WYYJKT6HUQACJ
- Story Text: Investigators have extracted cockpit voice recordings from one of the black boxes of the Airbus plane that smashed into the Alps and expect to have a read-out of their content within days, an official said on Wednesday (March 25).
The casing of a second black box has been found but not the box itself, French President Francois Hollande said as he came to the remote Alpine region with the leaders of Germany and Spain leaders to pay tribute to the 150 victims of Tuesday's crash.
"We just have been able to extract a useable audio data file," Remi Jouty, director of France's BEA air incident investigator told a news conference at its headquarters outside Paris.
But it was too early to draw any conclusions about the causes of the crash, he said.
"There will now be work on the file to understand and interpret the sounds and the voice that can be heard," he said, adding that he expected to have more analysis of the voices in "a matter of days".
Jouty declined to give details of the recordings. While stressing it was too early to form a clear picture, he said the crash scenario did not appear to be linked to depressurisation and he ruled out a mid-air explosion having taken place.
As police and forensic teams on foot and in helicopters investigated the site about 100 km (65 miles) north of Nice where the Airbus A320 airliner came down en route to Duesseldorf from Barcelona, Jouty said they were operating in challenging terrain.
"It's a mountainous site, very rugged. Access is very difficult because it is far from any road and because it is steep terrain on which one cannot easily walk and so which needs precautions to get there and to move around. So the conditions are very difficult. As you can see, the plane impacted side of the mountain at a high speed and energy. The plane disintegrated and dispersed and the pieces are of a very small size."
The last voice message from the Germanwings plane was a routine routing conversation with air traffic control (ATC), Jouty said.
"About a minute later, the trajectory from the ATC show that the plane began a descent and that this descent continued to impact as the last radar position is very close to the impact point. The descent lasted about 10 minutes. The last altitude recorded by radars is very close to the impact point. The altitude at the time was a little over 6,000 feet -- a little over the average altitude of the impact site. That means that the radar followed the plane until impact," he said.
The A320 is one of the world's most used passenger jets and has a good safety record.
At 24-years-old, the plane was older than many others at Lufthansa, where the average for its fleet is 11-and-a-half years. It was delivered to Lufthansa in 1991 and had clocked up around 58,000 flight hours over 46,000 flights, Airbus said. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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