The Wall Street Journal reports Second Black Box Found at China Eastern Plane Crash Site
A team of firefighters from southern China’s Guangxi autonomous region, where the aircraft nosedived into a mountainside, found the second black box Sunday around 9:20 a.m., Zhu Tao, a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said in a news conference. The box was roughly 130 feet away from where the plane had crashed, buried several feet underground, he said.
Rescuers had located the first black box, the cockpit voice recorder, on Wednesday, but authorities said they hadn’t been able to detect the positioning signal of the second box and speculated its signal transmitter may have been damaged in the crash.
The discovery of the black boxes—both of which are actually painted orange to make them easier to spot—is a critical moment in the aftermath of a plane crash, as they store vital information and typically provide accident investigators the best information about what caused a plane to go down.
The flight-data recorder tracks more than 1,000 flight details, such as airspeed and altitude, the status of smoke alarms and the position of the wing flaps. Parts of the recorder had been seriously damaged, but the data storage compartment appeared relatively intact, Mr. Zhu said, adding that the box has been sent to a professional laboratory for analysis.
Mysterious Plunge
Boeing 737 crash in southern China was among the fastest jetliner descents ever recorded. The Plane Plunged Almost 22,000 Feet in 72 Seconds.
Then the plane briefly ascended again before the final plunge and crash.
It is “extremely unusual to see an aircraft in a full nose dive,” one industry safety official in the U.S. said. “Many of us are scratching our heads.”
Hopefully, the black boxes will explain what happen.
Analysis can begin now that both black boxes have been recovered. I have my own questions.
Mish Questions
- Why are there two black boxes, each of which needs to be recovered?
- Instead, why aren’t there two mirrored black boxes, each with 100% of the data needed?
Authorities were concerned second box transmitter may have failed. In addition to not being found, the data may also be damaged in impact.
What’s the reason for having two boxes, both or which need to be recovered to get the complete picture?
One person responded with some information on why two, but if two are needed, then OK why not duplicate the most important one? Or better yet both of them?
This post originated at MishTalk.Com.
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The French journalist Florence de Changy, in her recent book about MH370 entitled “The Disappearing Act,” includes a passage about the Ukrainians (from the Russian-occupied areas of Eastern Ukraine):
While voice communications and other audio clues are important, the flight data recorder chronicles other information, and over a longer time period. “The flight data recorder is much more complex,” Cox says, as it records a multitude of variables.
And while the cockpit voice recorder is designed to keep two hours of audio, the flight data recorder goes back further. “The flight data recorders have enormous memory,” he says, estimating they can maintain seven to eight days of data. That means that if investigators have access to this data, they can consider information from multiple flights. “They can look back at previous flights on the flight data recorder to see how the accident flight would relate,” Cox says.
Brickhouse notes that the raw data that this device stores “looks just like a bunch of code,” but it can be converted into “an animation, or recreation, of the flight,” that shows what happened. For example, this video from the NTSB of a 2020 crash of a cargo aircraft utilizes data from the flight data recorder and other sources.