AirAsia Flight 8501: Cockpit Voice Recorder Recovered, Malaysian Official Confirms
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nuttapong/iStock Editorial/Thinkstock(SURABAYA, Indonesia) — Divers have retrieved the second black box from the crashed AirAsia jet from the Java Sea.
Liow Tion Lai, Malaysia’s Minister of Transport, made the announcement late Monday that the cockpit voice recorder from AirAsia Flight 8501 was recovered.
Lai said on Twitter that now that the two critical devices have been recovered, investigators can begin to analyze the important data.
#QZ8501 SAR operations have recovered the cockpit voice recorder. Now blackbox & CVR recovered, the investigators can analyse the data.
— Liow Tiong Lai (@liowtionglai) January 13, 2015
The aircraft’s tail — the largest portion of the plane found thus far — was discovered underwater last Wednesday.
Retrieval of these two devices may be the only way of learning exactly what brought down Flight 8501 when it disappeared from radar last Dec. 28 with 162 people on board.
The plane was on its way from Surabaya to Singapore when air traffic control lost contact with the pilots about 40 minutes into the flight.
Nearly 50 bodies have been recovered from the crash area off the coast of Indonesia. It’s believed that the remains of most of the other passengers are likely in the fuselage of the plane that has yet to be located.
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