Investigators hopeful of answers after Army helicopter’s ‘black box’ found following deadly DC collision
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The so-called “black box” from the Black Hawk helicopter, which collided with a passenger jet in Washington, D.C., has now been recovered, according to the National Transport Safety Board.
Both boxes from the American Airlines aircraft were previously found, and all three devices will now be taken for analysis, NTSB member Todd Inman said Friday, adding that the agency had a “high level of confidence” that information could be extracted from them.
It is hoped that the boxes will provide valuable insight into the final moments leading up to the deadly crash on Wednesday at D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Airport which killed 67 people.
Inman revealed the Black Hawk’s black box had been found at a media briefing. “It is safely at the NTSB headquarters. It will begin an evaluation, just as the other two recorders did last night, to determine when and how to take action,” he said.
He continued: “I can tell you from a visual inspection, we saw no exterior damage that would indicate that it was compromised at this time. So we have a high level of confidence that we will be able to have a full extraction from that as well.
Two separate recorders were recovered from the passenger plane, a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder.
According to Inman, the data recorder was “actually in what we consider good condition” and was soaked in alcohol overnight to help the data extraction process. “We have a high level of confidence that we will be able to get a full download in the very near future,” he said.
Information from the flight data recorder will not be released immediately as investigators will have to go through and correct up to 2,000 data sets to ensure they are synchronized, Inman said.
“Once we do have that download, we will not be releasing immediately the information regarding it. We will have to go through and correct the data sets, make sure they’re synchronized. It’s a very laborious practice, it takes a lot of time,” he said.
The cockpit voice recorder had “water intrusion” after crashing into the Potomac River, which according to Inman is “not uncommon. “We deal with that all the time,” he said. “Our recorders division is one of the best in the country, in the world.”
The voice recorder was also soaked overnight in ionized water, at which point it was put into a vacuum oven in order to extract moisture. The NTSB team is still checking electric connections to determine if they’re ready to try a download.
“It is one step of many steps that we will take in order to get that data, but we have a very high level of confidence that we will have it. We just have to work through a number of steps,” Inman said.
