Data from black boxes recovered from the June 12 Air India plane crash has been successfully downloaded and is being analysed, the governemnt said Thursday afternoon.
The black boxes – a flight data recorder, or FDR, and a cockpit voice recorder, or CVR – were damaged in the crash and there were questions over the recovery of usable data.
However, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau has now succeeded in safely extracting the Crash Protection Module, or CPM, and the memory module, and downloaded its data.
Meanwhile, reports say that all the bodies from the Air India Boeing Dreamliner crash in Ahmedabad have been recovered and several of the are still undergoing DNA matching, sources have said. Officials of the health department said all the bodies have now been recovered and so far, 253 bodies have been identified through DNA and six by facial recognition.
Since the flight to London crashed on June 12, there had been no official announcement about the total number of deaths. The authorities have said a figure could be arrived at only after the DNA matching took place.
256 bodies have been handed over to families so far. The DNA identification of the remaining bodies is still in progress.
The Boeing Dreamliner bound for London had started losing height and crashed seconds after the take-off, landing on residential campus of BJ Medical College in Meghani Nagar, located .just outside the airport perimeter. Only one passenger out of the 242 on board — a British-Indian man seated in 11A — had survived.
Air India has responded to the crash with a slew of safety and prevention measures that includes cutting down on the use of its wide-body planes for international flights by 15 per cent. The cuts will be implemented between now and 20 June and will continue thereafter until at least mid-July.
