The situation before the air collision has been determined

The chairman of the German lab for decoding the flight recorders of the two planes that collided in the air over Germany said that the data that were obtained from the black boxes has been stored on a computer. The specialists of the lab recreated the situation of July 2 over Lake Constance with an accuracy within five seconds. The indication of devices, which were registered with black boxes, compared to the talks between the crews and flight control officers, gave a distinct picture of the situation: who was talking, what and when, and how the systems of the planes were operating.

On Thursday, the results of the technical research will be presented to the members of the committee for investigation of the tragedy, as well as to the experts from Russia, Switzerland, the USA, and Bahrain. All that information will be eventually included on the report about the incident, RIA Novosti reported.

The work with the voice recorder of the Russian Tupolev 154 jetliner has not yet been completed. It was said that there was a need in a qualified translator, who would be familiar with aviation terms for accurate decoding of what had been said in the cockpit of the Russian plane. The lab has already done everything it could for cleaning the records from noises.

NTVRu.Com reported that a Russian expert was expected to start working with the records of the jetliners today. A spokesman for the German authorities stated that the participation of a Russian pilot would allow a precise conclusion regarding the reasons of the tragedy.

It is also known that the Swiss flight control officer made a mistake on the night of the tragedy. The collision prevention systems activated automatically on both planes, the system of the Russian plane asked the crew to increase altitude, and the system of the Boeing 757 ordered it to decrease altitude. The Swiss officer ordered the Russian crew to go down. The Russian pilot executed the order, which resulted in the crash.

Experts in the town of Friedrichshafen (the site of the crash) are trying to find out in which angle the collision took place. Specialists have already determined that it was hardly a frontal collision. RTR Vesti reported that there has only been one such incident in the history of the Russian civil aviation: it happened in 1979, when two passenger jetliners collided in the air. One of the planes was carrying the football team of the Uzbekistan club Pakhtakora. The squad died because of the mistake of the young flight control officer from the city of Kharkov.

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov