One of two black box recorders was located two days after a China Eastern flight crashed in southern China with more than 100 people on board.
Investigators said Wednesday they were unable to tell whether the salvaged black box was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder because of how damaged the apparatus was, Mao Yanfeng, director of the accident investigation division of the Civil Aviation Authority of China, told the Associated Press.
Yanfeng did not disclose the condition of the recording device inside the box.
NO SURVIVORS FOUND IN WRECKAGE OF CRASHED CHINESE AIRLINER
The search for the second box is still underway, according to the outlet. Searchers have been at the site of the plane crash looking for the plane’s black boxes, as well as human remains, after announcing there were no survivors on board.
Both boxes are typically a fluorescent orange color and “installed in the most crash survivable part of the aircraft” so they can be used by investigators to help determine the cause of the crash, according to Skybrary.
The flight data recorder can record information about the plane’s airspeed, altitude, direction, and more. Meanwhile, the cockpit voice recorder captures sounds, including the cockpit crew’s conversation and background noise.
The plane, a Boeing 737-800 operated by China Eastern Airlines, was traveling from Kunming to Guangzhou on Monday when it suddenly plunged 25,000 feet an hour within a three-minute span before colliding into a mountainside, reports said.
China Eastern grounded all the Boeing 737-800s in its fleet following the crash.
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Monday’s plane crash was the worst one to occur in China since August 2010, when an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines landed too far down a slick runway and caught fire. Forty-four of the 96 people on board died in the crash, which was later ruled a pilot error.
The cause of Monday’s deadly crash is still under investigation.
