Posted by By UCHE USIM on
To unearth the detailed cause of the ill-fated Beechcraft 1900D belonging to Wings Aviation, officials of the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) on Sunday headed for Air Accident Investigation Branch, United Kingdom to thoroughly examine the airplane's contents of the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR), popularly called black box.
To unearth the detailed cause of the ill-fated Beechcraft 1900D belonging to Wings Aviation, officials of the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) on Sunday headed for Air Accident Investigation Branch, United Kingdom to thoroughly examine the airplane's contents of the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and Flight Data Recorder (FDR), popularly called black box.
Briefing aviation correspondents in Lagos at the weekend, the head of the team and Director of Engineering of AIB, Engr Emmanuel Diala, said the decoding of the contents of the black boxes will put paid to speculations from various quarters surrounding the crash.
According to him, the AIB team had a nightmarish experience while trying to recover the two aircraft components from the mountainous region of Busi in Cross River State, noting that the two boxes were severely burnt by fire as a result of the crash but expressed hopes that vital information can still be decoded from the components as the fire was not too destructive.
Diala stated that the bureau, in the meantime, would be issuing a safety alert based on the results of the preliminary investigation it conducted on the crash.
The alert, he said, is to nip the likelihood of another crash in the Bebi Airstrip and also to promote safety in general.
He also said that the report of the unfortunate crash will be made public once it is ready, advising that the purpose of accident investigation was not to apportion blame but to prevent future reoccurrence.
On the extent of work done on the remains of the victims found at the crash site, Diala disclosed that the samples have been flown to South Africa for proper Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) analysis.
He also revealed that family members and siblings of the crash victims have been contacted for them to donate their blood samples for cross matching.
Explaining how the CVR and FDR functions, Diala stated that the FDR will determine the aircraft's vertical and horizontal acceleration. It is also to show its altitude, engine, Speed, flight position, time lapse from the problem to impact, among others.
On the other hand, the CVR will record the conversation between the pilots on the flight deck and the control tower.
It would be recalled that the Wings Aviation Beechcraft 1900D went missing since March 15 until the crash wreckage was found on September 3 by local hunters in Busi Village in Cross River State.