Once again, no distress call from cockpit.
As is becoming all too familiar, preliminary NTSB reports indicate that the UPS Airbus A300 flight that crashed in Birmingham, Alabama on Wednesday killing the 2 person crew made no distress call before the crash. Likewise, Asiana 214 which crash landed at San Francisco International just 5 weeks earlier made no distress call before hitting the edge of the seawall and shearing off the landing gear and tail section of the plane while killing 3 and injuring over 100 passengers.
Investigators hope to find out more details if they are able to recover data from the visually damaged flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. According to the website, Air Transport World.com the FDR and the CVR were difficult to recover initially because they were located in the tail section of the plane which smoldered for hours following an intense fire upon impact.
“US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators initially had trouble recovering the FDR and CVR because the rear section of the aircraft continued to smolder late into Wednesday night from the intense fire that had engulfed the A300F when it crashed at 6:11 a.m. Wednesday. But the recorders were able to be recovered Thursday and will be sent to Washington DC for examination at NTSB labs.”
The recorders are typically located in the tail section of the plane because research has shown that the tail is the most likely place for the boxes to survive a crash . . . usually.
