How an Unearthed Black Box Could Crack the Boeing 737 Plane Crash Mystery
The chances of solving the urgent question of why China Eastern Airlines’ Boeing 737-800 jet hit the ground at the speed of a missile, instantly killing all 132 people on board, suddenly looks more hopeful.
Searchers have found one of the airplane’s black boxes at the crash site near Wuzhou, China–the cockpit voice recorder. Given the severity of the impact it is not surprising that, according to the Chinese searchers at the site, the outer casing is badly deformed but the hard discs storing the data are, according to a Chinese official, “also damaged to some extent, but relatively complete.”
While the cockpit recorder data will be valuable in giving an audio record of many alarms sounding and exchanges between the pilot and copilot, it is of far less help in identifying what was happening to the airplane itself. That information is stored in real time detail in the other black box, the flight data recorder, which is yet to be found. Given that this recorder is better protected because it is in the rear of the airplane, not the nose, if found it will provide the kind of definitive technical picture that would be conclusive in an investigation.