DGCA to place orders for black box data retrieving devices

After having been compelled to send the black box of YS Rajasekhara Reddy's ill-fated helicopter to the US at a high cost, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is likely to place orders for import of the cockpit voice data retrieving devices from there.

The decision has come after the DGCA found itself unable to retrieve voice data from the partially damaged solid state cockpit voice recorder (CVR), which has electronic chips to store the voice data, of Bell 430 twin-engine helicopter that crashed in the Nallamalla forest in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh on September 2, killing the former chief minister  and four others.

The CVR, also called the black box, was retrieved from the crash site and brought to the DGCA office here.

Unable to retrieve the recording from the solid state voice recorder due to non-availability of the required equipment (milking unit), the DGCA sent it to the US for decoding the conversations of the pilots before the chopper crashed, official sources said.

The retrieved data has now been sent back from the US and the DGCA probe would hinge on it to throw light on the cause of the helicopter's crash, the sources said.

The CVRs are of two types, magnetic tape-based and the other is electronic chip-based.

Though the DGCA has the device to decode magnetic tapes recordings, it does not have the milking unit to decode the solid state CVRs which are usually installed in Bell-430 helicopters.