By IANS
Caracas : Venezuelan rescue teams, scouring the mountainous area of the Andes where a Venezuelan plane crashed Thursday for human remains and wreckages, have recovered the black boxes, Spain’s EFE news agency reported Sunday.
A twin-engine turboprop aircraft of Valenzuela’s Santa Barbara Airlines with 46 passengers on board crashed onto a mountain peak of the Los Conejos plateau of the Andes some 680 km southwest of Caracas where it was headed.
The two flight data recorders were found by a group of mountain climbers and rescue team members at an altitude of some 4,200 meters, rescuers said.
The boxes contain flight data and recordings of the pilots’ conversations both with the control towers and with each other.
Ramon Viñas, head of the National Civil Aviation Institute (INAC), handed over the two boxes to the aviation inspector in charge of the case, who announced that they would be sent to France immediately for decoding and analysis.
The Air Accidents Investigation Board said that it would formulate no hypothesis about what happened without having reliable data, including information from the boxes.
Photos taken Friday from one of the helicopters arriving at the crash scene showed that the aircraft was virtually pulverized and only a tail fragment was big enough to show its position.
The airline president said that the pilot and co-pilot were “excellent,” with an impeccable flight record, and also that the downed airliner was in perfect condition.