Iran Releases Data from Downed Ukraine Airliner

Iranian civil aviation authorities on Sunday released the first official material gathered from the so-called black boxes of a Ukrainian airliner downed by air-defense missiles just after a pre-dawn takeoff from Tehran’s international airport in January. All 176 passengers and crew aboard the plane were killed. State television cited Touraj Dehghani-Zanganeh, head of the Islamic Republic’s Civil Aviation Authority, as saying the retrieved data show that two missiles hit the aircraft 25 seconds apart and the cockpit voice recorder failed before the second strike. “Nineteen seconds after the first missile hit the plane, the voices of pilots inside the cockpit indicated that the passengers were alive,” Dehghani-Zanganeh said. “Therefore, no analysis of the performance and effects of the second missile was obtained from the aircraft’s black box.” Footage from security cameras shows what appear to be two missiles striking the airliner while it was still in flight. The airliner’s downing came just after rockets blamed on an Iran-backed Iraqi militia struck a military base in Iraq housing US and other foreign troops. Tehran did not immediately tie the two events together, nor did it admit right away that the Boeing 737 had been hit by Iranian missiles, although it has since called the incident a “disastrous mistake.”