Downed airliner’s ‘black box’ found—claim

Press, 24 September 1983, Page 10

Downed airliner’s ‘black box’ found—claim

NZPA-Reuter Tokyo Japanese Foreign Ministry sources were quoted yesterday as saying that the United States had located the “black box” of the South Korean airliner shot down by the Soviet Union on September 1. The big circulation daily newspaper “Asahi Shimbun” reported that the sources had said it was lying on the bottom of the sea, 725 metres below the surface.

Foreign Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment because yesterday was a public holiday in Japan. Rear-Admiral William Cockell of the

United States Seventh Fleet said that high frequency “pings” from the airliner’s “black box” had been detected twice this week, but declined to say if they had been picked up since. He was speaking to reporters aboard the guidedmissile cruiser U.S.S. Sterett, one of many American, Soviet and Japanese ships searching for remains of the airliner off the small Soviet island of Moneron to the north of Japan.

Evidence from the “black box,” which records crew conversations and flight information, may explain why the Korean airliner entered

Soviet airspace before it was shot down with the loss of 269 lives.

“Asahi Shimbun” quoted an unidentified top-ranking Foreign Ministry official as saying that the United States had told Japan that it would hand over the “black box” to the International Civil Aviation Organisation in Montreal when it was found.

The American military said yesterday that its search crews had made possible contacts with signals from the recorder, but that efforts to pinpoint the location had been frustrated by rough undersea terrain.