The black box of an American military plane that crashed off the coast of southwestern Japan at the end of November with eight people on board has been recovered, the American army said on Thursday.
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“Critical equipment identified by those responsible for the investigation has been recovered, including the voice and data recorder, often referred to as the 'black box,'” said an American Air Force Army Special Operations Command (AFSOC) communications official. .
“The equipment will be transported to laboratories for data extraction, which will then be analyzed by AFSOC,” she said, adding that she expected the analysis process to take “several weeks.”
The bodies of seven crew members had been found previously and searches for the eighth were still underway, AFSOC said.
The Osprey, an aircraft that can take off and land vertically like a helicopter and fly like an airplane, crashed on November 29 near the Japanese island of Yakushima during a training mission.
The reliability of this machine has been debated for a long time due to numerous fatal accidents.