Salvage teams of Tokyo crash search jet wrecks for black boxes

An international team of investigators is combing through the wreckage of the two aircraft that collided at Tokyo Haneda airport on Jan. 2 as they seek to establish what caused the runway incursion, with the voice and data recorders set to provide vital readouts of the fateful final moments before impact. The cockpit voice recorder from the smaller De Havilland Canada Dash 8 was recovered a day after the accident, and local media reported the flight recorder of the much larger Airbus SE A350 operated by Japan Airlines was retrieved Thursday. The JAL plane will be cleared from the runway Friday morning so that operations can resume. Airbus has dispatched experts to Japan to aid the investigation, and the teams have begun working on the mangled remains of the aircraft, which was almost entirely destroyed by a fire following the collision. Pressure is building to find out exactly what led to two aircraft ending up on the same runway strip at one of the world’s busiest commercial airports, and who should be held accountable. Initial readouts from conversations with air traffic control suggest the coast-guard plane didn’t have clearance for takeoff, while the Airbus A350 had permission to land. Yet the pilot of the smaller plane, the only person of a crew of six to survive the impact, has maintained he was cleared to depart. Airbus said after the crash that it had sent a team of specialists to assist the investigation. The French BEA accident investigation team is also involved, given the aircraft was manufactured in France, alongside the Japan Transport Safety Board. It’s not unusual for the black boxes — which are in fact painted bright orange — to remain undiscovered for a while after a crash. While the Airbus A350 was largely intact even after impact with the coast-guard plane, the aircraft subsequently burnt out entirely, with the fire raging for more than six hours. That, in turn, may complicate any search effort inside the charred wreck, said Darren Straker, the former head of aircraft accident investigations for the United Arab Emirates. “Finding it will not be immediate,” Straker said of the black-box devices. “They will know roughly where it is, but they will have to sift through it. When you’re going though a debris field everything looks the same, there’s evidence preservation issues.” Story has more.<br/>