Transcripts from retrieved black box to be available soon: DGCA on Kerala plane crash

New Delhi, Aug 09: Director General of Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) Arun Kumar on Sunday (August 9) said that the black box of Air India Express flight that crash-landed at Kozhikode Airport, Kerala on August 7, brought to Delhi and kept at DGCA lab for examination.

Kumar added that soon DGCA will have all transcripts from recovered black boxes. "We are also going to talk to Boeing to examine aircraft's original equipment and check for defects. Only after conducting a thorough and unbiased probe, can we tell what exactly happened," he added.

The DGCA chief said that after Mangalore air crash, suggestions were given by a committee regarding table-top runways and it was suggested by the committee to improve the pavement strength of Kozhikode airport. He added that the committee has also suggested to increase the runway and safety area of the airport. According to Kumar, the Airport Authority of India had recarpeted the runway and the strengthening of the runway was done in 2016.

The Air India Express flight from Dubai with 190 people onboard, including a six-member crew, overshot the tabletop runway while landing in heavy rain, fell into a valley 35 feet below and broke into two. A total of 149 people have been admitted to various hospitals.

Twenty-three have been discharged, while three are critically injured, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri had said on Saturday after his visit to the Kozhikode Medical College, where many of the affected passengers have been admitted.

Puri had told reporters that Sathe, a former wing commander of the Air Force, was one of the most-experienced commanders with more than 10,000 flying hours and had landed aircraft 27 times at the Kozhikode airport. Kumar had a total flying experience of 1,723 hours.