A senior air accident investigator says it is likely the unrecovered black box from the crashed Air New Zealand plane is still intact and will eventually reveal vital clues on what went wrong.
In any serious plane crash, the first things investigators start looking for are the so-called back boxes.
They are in fact coloured orange, and there are always two of them: a cockpit voice recorder and a data recorder. They are designed to withstand and survive impacts.
The boxes are stored near the tail section. The A320's cockpit voice recorder has been found and sent to Paris for analysis.
But the flight data recorder has yet to be found, and getting that is crucial because it is the technical record of everything the plane did over the previous 50 hours.
Just why it is taking so long for divers to recover the data recorder from the Airbus remains unclear. The boxes usually emit their own a locator beacon.
"The depth of water shouldn't be a problem," says senior investigator Peter Williams. "The impact should probably have not damaged the boxes, so we should be able to get the information."
A New Zealand air accident investigator now been formally accredited to join the investigation, so while the French lead it, a New Zealand official will be playing a role in discovering what went so badly wrong.
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