Ethiopian Airlines ‘Black Box’ Found Near Crash Site
Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Search crews have retrieved the black box recorder from the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing Co. 737 that crashed into the sea off Beirut with 90 people on board last month, the Lebanese army said.

“We found it and retrieved it about an hour ago today,” Lebanese army Brigadier Saleh Haj Suleiman said in a telephone interview. He added that the two rear wings attached to the tail of the plane were found late yesterday.

Flight ET409, bound for Addis Ababa, lost contact with air traffic controllers in stormy weather minutes after takeoff from Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport on Jan. 25. No survivors have been found and only 15 bodies were recovered in a search aided by United Nations, British, French and U.S. forces.

Black boxes record pilot communications and technical data such as the aircraft’s altitude, speed and trajectory, which could help investigators, determine the reason for the crash.

The boxes are designed to sink and not float to make them easier to locate.

Efforts to find the plane initially focused about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) offshore and extended to waters as deep as 1,500 meters (4,900 feet). Debris has been found off the shores of Lebanon and the Syrian city of Latakia, local media reported.

The crash was the first involving Ethiopian Airlines since 1988, excluding a fatal hijacking in 1996, according to data from aviation consultant Ascend, and was the fourth fatal accident involving the new generation 737, introduced 12 years ago.


--Editors: James Kraus, Mike Harrison


To contact the reporter on this story: Massoud A. Derhally in Amman, Jordan at +962-77-988-1588 or mderhally@bloomberg.net
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Lebanon finds crash jet recorders

AlJazeera I February 7, 2010

Search teams off Lebanon's coast have located the flight recorders of an Ethiopian Airlines jet that crashed into the Mediterranean sea last month, the Lebanese transport minister said.

Ghazi Aridi said on Saturday that the recorders, commonly referred to as black boxes, were discovered at a depth of 45m, off the coastal village of Naameh, just south of Beirut airport.

"Lebanese army divers have gone down to retrieve them, but this operation will take time," Aridi said.

"We have to be cautious because we must preserve the data contained in the boxes."

He said the recorders were found under parts of the plane's fuselage and tail.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET409, a Boeing 737 aircraft, crashed on January 25, just minutes after taking offfrom Beirut airport in the middle of a thunderstorm.

All 90 passengers and crew aboard the flight - mostly of Lebanese and Ethiopian descent - are believed to have died in the crash, although not all bodieshave been accounted for.

A Lebanese army officer announced more than a week ago that the flight recorders' signal had been detectedat a depth of about 1,300m and about 10km from Beirut's seaside airport. Search teams, however, have not yet been able to collect the boxes.

Aridi said that retrieving the flight data recorders would be crucial to determining the cause of the crash.

Lebanese officials have said the captain was instructed by the control tower to change to a certain heading, but that the aircraft then took a different course.

Preliminary investigations indicated that the plane broke apart in mid-air before crashing into the sea.