Update - MD-83 Crash In Southern Turkey

From Today's Zaman - Ankara

Black box of crashed plane was out of order

The black box from the Atlasjet airplane that crashed on Nov. 30 near an Isparta airport, killing all 57 people on board, was out of order at the time of the accident, new evidence revealed on Saturday.

The cockpit recorder device (CVR), also known as a black box, had not been working for the ninth day in a row at the time of the crash, a technical investigation being carried out in Germany revealed. The latest recording from a flight on the plane, an MD 83 leased by Atlasjet from World Focus, was from Nov 21.

According to safety rules that apply to MD83 planes, a plane with a broken CVR cannot be flown for more than three flights. Teams investigating the Isparta crash say the plane had made many flights in the nine days before its last.

It was also discovered that the plane's flight data recorder (FDR) was also out of order. The device had recorded only 15 minutes of the entire flight, the experts said. The investigation into the accident is ongoing and has been expanded in light of the new data, officials from the Transportation Ministry said.