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CANBERRA - The black box voice recorder from an Indonesian passenger jet which crashed last week in Java has been sent to the United States after Australian experts failed to retrieve vital data, an investigator said today.
A team of Australian investigators worked on the two flight data recorders through the weekend, but said they were unable to retrieve cockpit voice recordings, although other flight information had been successfully decoded.
"We have tried every method we can to download the cockpit voice recorder without success and that includes in consultation with the component manufacturer Honeywell in the US," Australian Transport Safety Bureau Deputy Director Joe Hattley told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Garuda Indonesia flight GA200 overshot the runway in Yogyakarta last Wednesday and burst into flames in a paddy field, killing 21 people, including five Australians.
Indonesian crash investigators asked their Australian counterparts for help in determining why the accident occurred as they assess claims by the two surviving pilots that the jet was hit by a freak wind downdraft as it prepared to land.
Hattley said the flight data recorder, which contains more than 200 different pieces of flight data, including the speed of the plane, vertical acceleration, flap settings and wind, had yielded vital information, already passed to Indonesia.
The bureau's executive director Kym Bills said it was up to Indonesian investigators to assess the data decoded so far.
"It's more of a matter of checking it against the physical evidence and the other evidence that they've gathered on the accident site and in relation to the whole investigation," Bills said.
- REUTERS
