Black box recordings of the Ukrainian airliner which crashed on the outskirt of Tehra will be downloaded in France, head of the accident investigation board of Civil Aviation Organization of Iran announced today.
Speaking to IRNA, Hassan Rezaeifar said although Iran made use of all its facilities to examine the content of the black box inside the country since the plane is kind of the modern Boeing that Iran lacks the needed technology to decode it, it will be sent to France so that its black box is downloaded there to avoid any damage to it.
A Ukraine Airlines aircraft crashed in southern Tehran on Wednesday morning (Jan 8). All 176 people aboard including nine crew members lost their lives.
Elaborating on the issue, Rezaeifar said Iran asked Canada, France and the US to bring their software and hardware equipment to Tehran to download the data of the black box of the Ukrainian plane, but they did not accept Iran's proposal.
Then, Iran asked Ukraine, Sweden, Britain, Canada, and the US to send the black box to an impartial laboratory and France was the country all five countries agreed on, the official added.
As Rezaeifar said, Iran and France have an agreement to download planes' black boxes.
However, all those decisions have been taken before the Saturday statement of the General Staff of the Islamic Republic of Iran's Armed Forces about the plane crash, the official noted.
Hours after Iran's missile strike, the warplanes belonging to the terrorist American forces increased sorties of their flights in the airspace surrounding Iran with reports keeping to come about some flying targets which were moving towards Iran's defense targets.
Also, numerous cases were observed on radar screens which demanded further alertness on the part of the Iranian airforce defense units, General Staff of Iran Armed Forces said in the first part of a statement issued Saturday morning.
In such a sensitive and critical situation, flight 752 of Ukraine Airlines which had taken off from Imam Khomeini International Airport, moved very close to a sensitive military spot belonging to the IRGC forces when completing a loop.
The altitude and the direction of the flight's movement were like an enemy target, so the aircraft was targeted unintentionally due to human error which unfortunately caused the martyrdom of a number of Iranian national together with a number of foreigners, it added.
However, he further noted, now that the cause of the crash has been identified, the official will have to decide whether there is a need to send the black box to France. ■
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