The plane crashed last Friday in a residential area of the port city of Karachi (File)
Islamabad:
An airline spokesman on Thursday recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the wreckage of a Pakistani airliner that crashed last week in a neighborhood of the city, killing 97 people in edge.
The Pakistan International Airlines Airbus A320 crashed Friday in a residential area of the port city of Karachi. Two people on board survived.
Flight PK8303, from the eastern town of Lahore to Karachi, descended approximately one kilometer from the runway when it attempted a second time to land.
“Search resumed this morning and the voice recorder was found buried in the rubble,” spokesman Abdullah H. Khan said in a statement.
“The recovery of the cockpit voice recorder will greatly assist in the investigation.”
The flight data recorder had already been found.
Pakistani officials and Airbus investigators are gathering evidence at the site as they try to determine the cause of the country’s worst air disaster in years.
Under international aviation rules, French BEA investigators – the French aviation safety investigation authority for civil aviation – joined the Pakistan-led probe because the 15-year-old Airbus plane was designed in France.
The BEA said in a statement that the two recorders would be examined in its laboratory located just outside Paris. He posted a photo of one of them on Twitter showing that it appeared to be intact inside its impact-resistant shell and metal base.
The aircraft’s CFM56 engines are expected to be the focus of the investigation after the pilot reported that the two failed shortly after the aircraft attempted unsuccessfully to land.
The engines were manufactured by CFM International, a French joint venture between Safran and General Electric, and are among the most widely used and reliable in the airline industry.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
