Last Seconds of Airbus A321 Black Box Tape to Be Analyzed Outside of Egypt

The last seven seconds of the flight recorder from the Kogalymavia flight 9268 that crashed in the Sinai Peninsula on October 31 will be decrypted outside of Egypt, the country’s Minister of Civil Aviation Husam Kamal told the local newspaper al-Ahram in an interview.

On October 31, the Airbus А321, operated by the Russian airline Kogalymavia en route from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, crashed in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board. Currently, an investigation process to find out the causes of the plane crash is taking place.

"This sound [the last seven seconds of the flight recorder] will be analyzed using special equipment which most countries don't have. So the last seven seconds from the black boxes recording will be sent to one of the countries where the crashed plane was manufactured," the Egyptian Minister said.

Earlier, a commission investigating the tragic incident reported that the initial analysis of the voice recorder detected noises of an unknown origin. To find out the nature of these unspecified noises a special spectral analysis of the recorded data would have to be done.

On Tuesday, Vice President of Communications at Airbus Stefan Schaffrath said that the Airbus A321 was fully functional prior to the tragedy, thus rejecting the version of a technical failure as the cause of the accident.