QZ 8501 Second Flight Recorder Recovered

14th Jan 2015

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) is one of the two black boxes that may hold the clue as to the cause of the plane's catastrophic end in the early morning of December 28, 2014. The other black box, the flight data recorder (FDR), was first recovered last Monday, January 12.

The recovery of the two black boxes will hopefully help investigators to hasten their investigation on the incident.

The Indonesia AirAsia flight departed Surabaya's Juanda International Airport at 5:35AM on December 28 on its way to Singapore. More than half an hour into its flight, or just over Karimata Strait, the pilot sent a request to the air traffic controller seeking permission to climb to an altitude of 38,000 to avoid a big storm cloud forming ahead in its path at 32,000 feet.

Based on the radar data, the pilot failed to receive a timely response from the ground controller, prompting him to decide on his own to make a drastic ascent by increasing the plane's acceleration rate to 6,000 feet per minute which is believed to be way beyond the safe level for any type of aircraft.

The investigators could now start their full-blown investigation with the recovery of the two black boxes while search and retrieval operations continue.

On January 11, the search teams were able to locate and recover a big chunk of fuselage measuring 10 x 4 meters from the ocean floor. Part of the tail was first recovered on January 7.

Earlier last week, the searchers have just located a huge chunk of the aircraft's fuselage with part of the wing still attached to it. A team of divers were deployed to recover it as soon as the undersea current was safe enough to navigate.

They believe that the chunk of the fuselage that has just been detected holds some of the bodies who are still unaccounted for.

So far, only 48 bodies of the 162 people on board were retrieved and 45 were already identified through DNA samples.

The two flight recorders play a crucial part of the investigation as they offer clues or evidences that may aid to hasten the job of the investigators. The CVR (cockpit voice recorder), as its name implies, records the voice or audio inside the cockpit area while the FDR (flight data recorder) records any instructions sent to any electronic systems inside the aircraft.