The black boxes of the DHL plane that crashed in Vilnius on Monday morning are planned to be sent to Germany for decryption, Laurynas Naujokaitis, head of the Justice Ministry’s Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation Division, has said.
“We are planning to send it to Germany, but we are still waiting for a response from the pre-trial investigation authorities because they assign officials to accompany the black boxes. Most likely, we plan to have some data by Friday,” Naujokaitis told BNS on Wednesday,
According to him, it should not be difficult for specialists to extract all the data from the black boxes, as they did not suffer major damage. He also stressed that the data will not be made public.
Lithuania has no laboratory suitable for the analysis of the black boxes, Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Crisis Management Centre (NKVC), said earlier on Wednesday.
“The first job is to retrieve them from the scene of the accident, then to protect them from any external damage so that they can be safely transported to the laboratories. Of course, Lithuania does not have such a laboratory, and I think the commission will decide which country they will be transported to,” Vitkauskas told LRT RADIO.
The flight data and cockpit call logs (black boxes) of the DHL cargo plane that crashed on Monday were found on Tuesday and were removed from the wreckage.
According to the Justice Ministry, the safety investigation team has started organising the decryption of the data from the black boxes.
A 48-year-old Spanish national was killed and another Spaniard, a German and a Lithuanian national were injured when a DHL cargo plane crashed near Vilnius Airport on Monday morning.
The inspection of the crashed plane should be completed within three days, after which the aircraft will be removed from the scene.
It is not yet clear what caused the crash of the cargo plane, and the possibility of sabotage or terrorist acts cannot be ruled out, the authorities have said.
The crashed Boeing 737-476(SF) plane was owned by Spanish airline Swiftair and was used by DHL for parcel deliveries. The aircraft was flying from Leipzig, Germany.
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