Black boxes from the Ukrainian Boeing downed in January over Tehran revealed the pilots were still alive after the plane was hit by the first of the two missiles, Iranian officials said on Sunday.
The Iranian armed forces admitted on January 11 having shot down “by mistake” three days earlier the Boeing operating Ukraine International Airlines flight PS 752 between Tehran and Kiev, shortly after takeoff from Tehran International Airport.
The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) captured a conversation between the pilot, the co-pilot and an instructor “up to 19 seconds after the first missile hit the plane,” the aviation chief said civilian of the Islamic Republic, Touraj Dehghani Zanganaeh, quoted by the Iribnews state television website.
“The instructor indicates that the plane has an electronic problem and that the auxiliary power supply has been activated,” he added, sharing for the first time black box data extracted by the Bureau of Investigation and analyzes (BEA) in Paris.
“The pilots were told that the two engines of the plane were on,” said Dehghani Zanganaeh.
The black boxes stopped working 19 seconds after the first strike. “Analysis of the consequences of the second missile cannot be obtained from the black boxes,” said Dehghani Zanganaeh.
The tragedy claimed the lives of the 176 people on board the aircraft, mostly Iranians and Canadians, many of them binational.
After diplomatic passes between Canada and Ukraine, which demanded that the black boxes be sent abroad for analysis, the French BEA indicated at the end of June that Iran had officially requested its technical assistance to repair and download the data they contained.
On the day of the crash, Iran’s air defenses were on high alert for fear of a US attack.
Iran expected a response from Washington after attacking a base used by the US military in Iraq in response to the elimination, in an American strike in Baghdad, of General Qassem Soleimani, architect of the regional strategy of the ‘Iran.