Black Boxes not proving to be very helpful.
From New York Times
Flight Recorders Little Aid in Russia Crashes
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: August 27, 2004
MOSCOW, Aug. 26 - The flight recorders of two Russian airliners that crashed nearly simultaneously on Tuesday night were damaged and could provide little help in determining the cause of the twin disasters, which killed at least 89 people, senior Russian officials said Thursday.
One of the officials, Vladimir A. Yakovlev, President Vladimir V. Putin's envoy for Russia's southern federal district, said all signs suggested that Sibir Airlines Flight 1047 exploded as it flew toward Sochi on the Black Sea, sending a swath of debris to the ground near Rostov-on-Don, a city in the south. He stopped short of blaming a bomb for that explosion, though he did concede Thursday that the government's main theory "remains terrorism."
The second plane, Volga-AviaExpress Flight 1303, crashed near a village 100 miles south of Moscow at 10:56 p.m., the same time that Flight 1047's pilots activated an emergency alert indicating that their plane had been hijacked, a fact confirmed by officials on Thursday. Flight 1047 disappeared from radar screens less than a minute later, a chronology published on Thursday in the newspaper Kommersant said...
...Mr. Yakolev said the flight recorders might never determine the exact cause of either crash. "They switched themselves off immediately," he said in televised remarks. "And so we failed to get any information."
Other officials said the recorders had been damaged, which could delay, though not necessarily prevent, efforts to determine the cause. A spokesman for the Federal Security Service, the successor to the K.G.B., which has been put in charge of the investigation, said that investigators had not found evidence of explosives in the wreckage of either plane.
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