(Paris) The black boxes of the Ukrainian Boeing shot down in January over Tehran have arrived in Paris for analysis at the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA), we learned on Saturday from the BEA, confirming information from Iranian source.
Posted on 18 July 2020 at 8 o'clock45 Updated to 12 h 08
France Media Agency
The black boxes “will be at the BEA from Monday” where an international team of around twenty people will be able to decipher them, according to the French organization.
In June, the BEA explained that the black boxes would be analyzed on its premises, as part of a “security investigation led by Iran”.
The Iranian armed forces acknowledged on 11 January that they had shot three “by mistake” days earlier the Boeing operating the PS 752 flight of Ukraine International Airlines between Tehran and Kiev, shortly after taking off from the airport Tehran International.
PHOTO EBRAHIM NOROOZI, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
The drama cost the lives of 176 people on board the aircraft, mostly Iranians and Canadians , for many binationals.
Hit by an American embargo, Tehran immediately announced after the crash that it refused to send the black boxes to the United States, even if the aircraft and engines were of American design.
But Iran does not have the technical means to extract and decipher data from black boxes.
After diplomatic arms passes between Canada and Ukraine, which demanded that the black boxes be sent abroad for analysis, the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) had indicated the end June Iran asked him officially for technical assistance to repair and download the black box data.
“The French government has had very good cooperation with the Iranian delegation, for which I thank France,” Iranian deputy minister Mohsen Baharvand said on Saturday in an interview with the reformist daily Etemad.
Few laboratories in the world have the technical capacity to repair damaged recorders in order to be able to extract the data.
In addition to the American NTSB, the French BEA is among the most renowned in this area.
The Iranian ministry had indicated in June that the process of sending black boxes had been delayed by the pandemic of new coronavirus which hard hit Iran and which resulted in the cancellation of most of the international flights.
The last Iranian Civil Aviation report published in mid-July indicated that the “key element” behind the drama was “human error”, namely the incorrect setting of a military radar tracked other malfunctions.
The black boxes should contain information about the final moments of the aircraft before it was struck by two surface-to-air missiles and crashed.
On that day, Iran's air defenses were on high alert after the Islamic Republic fired missiles at an Iraqi base sheltering American soldiers intended to avenge the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, killed in an American drone strike in Baghdad on January 3.
The international team that will analyze the black boxes in Paris will be made up of experts from Iran, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the United Kingdom, Canada, Ukraine, Sweden, the United States and France, we learned from the BEA.
Work on the black boxes should start on 20 July, according to the Bureau.
