Iran retrieves downed plane’s cockpit conversation

IRAN has retrieved some data, including a portion of the cockpit conversations, from the Ukrainian plane that was accidentally downed by the Revolutionary Guard in January, killing all 176 people on board, an Iranian official said yesterday.

This according to a report on the website of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation, which described the official’s remarks as part of the final report that Tehran plans to issue on the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

The development comes months after the January 8 crash near Tehran. Iranian authorities had initially denied responsibility, only changing course days later, after Western nations presented extensive evidence that Iran had shot down the plane.

The shoot-down happened the same night Iran launched a ballistic missile attack targeting US soldiers in Iraq, its response to the American drone strike that killed Guard General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3.

At the time, Iranian troops were bracing for a US counterstrike and appeared to have mistaken the plane for a missile. Iran, however, has not acknowledged that, only saying that after the missile attack, its air defence was sufficiently alert and had allowed previously scheduled air traffic to resume.

The Ukrainian passenger plane was apparently targeted by two missiles. The plane had just taken off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport when the first missile exploded, possibly damaging its radio equipment. The second missile likely directly struck the aircraft, as videos from that night show the plane exploding into a ball of fire before crashing into a playground and farmland on the outskirts of the Iranian capital.

For days after the crash, Iranian investigators combed the site, sifting through the debris of the plane.

The head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation, Captain Touraj Dehghani Zangeneh, said yesterday that the plane’s black boxes have only 19 seconds of conversation following the first explosion, though the second missile reached the plane 25 seconds later.

He said the first missile explosion sent shrapnel into the plane, likely disrupting the plane’s recorders. He did not reveal any details of the cockpit conversation that was retrieved.

Representatives from the US, Ukraine, France, Canada, Britain and Sweden, countries whose citizens were killed in the crash, were present during the process to gather data from the recorders, Zangeneh said.

In the months since the downing of the plane, Iran has struggled with vast domestic economic problems and a major health crisis. It has the Middle East’s largest and deadliest outbreak of the coronavirus, with more than 358 000 confirmed cases, including 20 643 deaths.

Last month, an initial report from the Iranian investigation said that a misaligned missile battery, miscommunication between troops and their commanders and a decision to fire without authorisation all led to the fatal downing of the jetliner.

That report said the surface-to-air missile battery that targeted the Boeing 737-800 had been relocated and was not properly reorientated. Those manning it could not communicate with their command centre.