The pilot was still alive after the plane was shot down
The black box of a Ukrainian plane that crashed in Tehran, Iran revealed the pilot was still alive, after being shot by one of two missiles, Iranian officials reported on Sunday.
Flight 752, a Ukrainian International Airlines passenger jet crashed just as it took off from Tehran's main airport on January 8.
Iran had admitted days after the incident that a Boeing 737-800 belonging to Ukrainian International Airlines had been shot down, killing all 176 passengers and crew.
Tehran's air defense is on alert if the United States (US) responds to an Iranian attack a few hours earlier on U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.
Iran's chief civil aviation authority on Sunday revealed for the first time what was contained in the black box. It was sent to France for analysis.
Touraj Dehghani Zanganeh said a voice recorder in the cockpit recorded a conversation between the pilot, the second pilot and an instructor between the two explosions.
"Until 19 seconds after the first missile exploded around the aircraft, (they) realized the situation was abnormal and were in control of the aircraft until the last moment.
"The instructor indicated that the aircraft had an electronic problem and additional power had been activated.
"The pilot was told that both aircraft engines were still working," he was quoted as saying by the local television station website.
According to Dehghani Zanganeh, the plane's black box stopped 19 seconds after the first explosion, making it impossible to retrieve the impact data of the second missile.
He said the analysis on the impact of the second missile could not be obtained from the black box.
Iran, intending to decrypt the information from the black box, sent it to France for analysis in mid-July, almost six months after the incident.
SOURCE: BH