UAE authority: Russia plane crash data 'satisfactory'

Investigators have successfully downloaded all the information from the flight recorders on the FlyDubai plane that crashed in southern Russia and determined it is in a "satisfactory" state, the United Arab Emirates' aviation regulator said today.
The statement from the UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority suggests authorities are making progress in the probe to determine what caused the Boeing 737-800 to crash in Rostov-on-Don on March 19, killing all 62 people aboard.
Russian authorities leading the investigation have said previously that the plane's so-called black boxes were heavily damaged when the plane nosedived and exploded on impact.
The Emirati GCAA has sent a team to Russia to assist with the investigation.

It said all the data from both the cockpit voice recorder, which covers the last two hours of the flight, and the flight data recorder have now been downloaded.
"The quality of the recorded speech and sound is satisfactory," it said. It used the same term to describe the quality of the flight data recorder information.

Experts have been poring over the voice recorder data for the past five days and are transcribing it into English and Russian, the Emirati regulator said.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
Several planes had trouble landing at the airport before the crash because of strong winds. The FlyDubai plane was making its second attempt to land when it plunged into the ground.

"Before the data is fully examined, it would be premature to hypothesize the cause of the accident," GCAA Director-General Saif Mohammed al-Suwaidi said in the statement.
Sergei Zaiko, deputy chairman of Russia's Inter-State Aviation Committee, last week cautioned that data recovery could prove difficult and said could not immediately read the information because of the severity of the damage.