Kozhikode:
The flight data recorders of the Air India Express flight that broke into pieces after it skidded off a tabletop runway amid heavy rain at Kerala’s Kozhikode airport late Friday evening have been found.
The recorders – a Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) and a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) store crucial information about a plane’s altitude, position and speed, as well as records of conversations between the pilots, and are critical in helping aviation investigators understand what happened to flight IX-1344.
Eighteen people, including both pilots, were killed after the flight from Dubai, which was carrying 190 people, skidded, overshot the runway and slid into a valley at 7.41 PM Friday.
Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, who is expected in Kozhikode this afternoon, has ordered an investigation.
The pilots, one of them a decorated former fighter pilot, had aborted two landings due to tailwind and had circled the airport several times before the final landing. The area had been slammed by torrential rains since Thursday.
“According to weather radar, the approach was for runway 28 but as the pilots faced difficulties, they went around twice and came from the opposite side on runway 10 and the plane crash-landed,” news agency ANI quoted an investigator of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) as saying.