TEHRAN: The black boxes of a Ukrainian airliner mistakenly downed in Tehran have revealed the pilots were still alive after the first of two missiles hit the plane, Iranian officials said on Sunday.

Flight 752, a Ukraine International Airlines passenger jet, crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran’s main airport on January 8.

Iran admitted days later that its forces accidentally shot down the Kiev-bound Boeing 737-800 aircraft, killing all 176 people on board.

Tehran’s air defenses had been on high alert at the time in case the US retaliated against Iranian strikes hours earlier on American troops stationed in Iraq.

The head of Iran’s civil aviation authority on Sunday revealed for the first time what was on the black boxes, which had been sent to France for analysis.

Touraj Dehghani Zanganeh said that the cockpit voice recorder registered a conversation between the pilot, co-pilot and an instructor between the two blasts.

“Up to 19 seconds after the first missile exploded in the vicinity of the aircraft, (they) noticed abnormal conditions and were in control of the aircraft until the last moment,” he said, quoted by state television’s website.

“The instructor indicates that the aircraft has an electronic problem and the auxiliary power has been activated,” he said.

“The pilots were notified that both engines of the aircraft were on.” The black boxes stopped working 19 seconds after the first explosion, making it impossible to retrieve data on the impact of the second missile, he said.

Analysis on the “effect of the second missile cannot be obtained from the black boxes,” said Zanganeh.

Iran, which has no means of decoding the black boxes, sent them to France for analysis in mid-July, nearly six months after the disaster.

Analysis from the black boxes of a downed Ukrainian passenger plane shows it was hit by two missiles 25 seconds apart and that passengers were still alive for some time after the impact of the first blast, Iran said on Sunday.

The announcement by the head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation marks the first official report on the contents of the cockpit voice and data recordings, which were sent to France for reading in July.

Tehran has said it accidentally shot down the Ukraine airliner in January at a time of extreme tensions with the United States. All 176 people aboard the plane were killed.

The second missile hit the aircraft 25 seconds after the first, but only 19 seconds of that gap was captured on the recordings because of damage from the first missile, Touraj Dehghani-Zanganeh was cited as saying by state television.

“Nineteen seconds after the first missile hit the plane, the voices of pilots inside the cockpit indicated that the passengers were alive [...] 25 seconds later the second missile hit the plane,” he was reported as saying.

“Therefore, no analysis of the performance and effects of the second missile was obtained from the aircraft’s black box.” The aircraft’s flight crew — two pilots and an instructor also travelling in the cockpit — tried to keep control of the plane until the last moment, Zanganeh said.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2020