Iran Seeks U.S., French Help To Decode Crashed Ukrainian Plane’s Black Box

Ukraine Airlines

TEHRAN, Jan 22 (NNN-PRESS TV) – Iran asked the French and U.S. accident investigation agencies, the BEA and NTSB respectively, for the equipment to decode the black box of the crashed Ukrainian plane.

The latest report by Iran’s civil aviation agency noted that, two Tor-M1 missiles were fired at the airliner from the north, and how the projectiles contributed to the crash were still under investigation.

The flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, commonly known as the black boxes, feature cutting-edge technology and Iran lacks the technical facilities to decode them, according to the report.

“If devices are provided, the information (on the black boxes) can be restored and retrieved in a short period of time,” the report said.

Iran’s civil aviation agency, requested French and U.S. accident investigation agencies to provide a list of the equipment required to decode the black boxes, and to possibly transfer them to Iran, it said.

However, neither organisation has “so far responded positively” to the request, and Iran is considering the purchase of those equipment, it added.

On Sunday, Hassan Rezaeefar, director of incident investigation of Iran’s civil aviation agency, said, Iran was trying to decode the black boxes, before planning to send it to a second country.

“Iran holds the black boxes of the Boeing 737 plane and has currently no plan to send it out,” Rezaeefar was quoted as saying, by official IRNA news agency.

“We are trying to read the data of the damaged Ukrainian plane inside Iran. Ukraine and France are our next options (for reading the data), but we have not decided on sending them to a second country yet.”

Rezaeefar earlier told IRNA that, Iran possesses no technology to download and read the data of the plane’s black boxes, since it is “a modern and advanced Boeing passenger plane.”