The Investgative authorities in Lithuania say there is no research facility in the country that can analyse the black boxes of the cargo plane that crashed near Vilnius airport on Monday.
The black boxes (FDR and CVR) from the SWIFT airline -operated DHL cargo B737-476(SF) aircraft (EC-MFE) that crashed in Vilnius on Monday morning are planned to be sent to Germany for decryption, Laurynas Naujokaitis, head of the Justice Ministry’s Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation Division, has said.
The investigators hope that the evaluation of the flight recorders will provide important insights into the cause of the crash.
“We are planning to send it to Germany, but we are still waiting for a response from the pre-trial investigation authorities because they assign officials to accompany the black boxes. Most likely, we plan to have some data by Friday,” Naujokaitis told BNS on Wednesday.
According to him, it should not be difficult for specialists to extract all the data from the black boxes, as they did not suffer major damage. He also stressed that the data will not be made public.
Lithuania has no laboratory suitable for their analysis of the black boxes, Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Crisis Management Centre (NKVC), said earlier on Wednesday.
“The first job is to retrieve them from the scene of the accident, then to protect them from any external damage so that they can be safely transported to the laboratories."
"Of course, Lithuania does not have such a laboratory, and I think the commission will decide which country they will be transported to,” Vitkauskas told LRT RADIO.
The flight data and cockpit call logs (black boxes) of the DHL cargo plane that crashed on Monday were found on Tuesday and were removed from the wreckage.
Officials from Spain and Germany are coming to Lithuania to investigate the causes of a cargo plane crash in Vilnius.
According to the Justice Ministry, the safety investigation team has started organising the decryption of the data from the black boxes.
The Justice Ministry also informed the authorities of the US, where the plane was manufactured, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the European Commission, and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency about the incident.
Laurynas Naujokaitis, head of the Justice Ministry’s Transport Accident and Incident Investigation Division, said:
“The sole purpose of a safety investigation is to prevent accidents and incidents in the future, not to determine who is at fault or responsible,”
“Who is at fault and responsible is determined by the judicial authorities. Our investigation is focused solely on aviation safety and is independent of other pre-trial investigations that aim to determine who is at fault.”
According to Laurynas Naujokaitis, this is the first time that Lithuanian authorities have been confronted with such a situation.
A Spanish national was killed and another Spaniard, a German and a Lithuanian national were injured when the DHL cargo plane crashed near Vilnius Airport on Monday morning.
The preliminary inspection of the crashed plane should be completed within three days, after which the aircraft will be removed from the scene.
Many details of the accident are not yet available. It is also not yet clear what caused the crash of the freighter, and the possibility of sabotage or terrorist acts cannot be ruled out at this time, the authorities have said.
The crashed Boeing 737-476(SF) plane, which was a converted passenger to freighter version, was owned by Spanish airline Swiftair and was used by DHL. The aircraft was flying from Leipzig, Germany.
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