Weak Signal Picked up from 'Black Box' in Crashed China Plane

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, May 09, 2002

Weak Signal Picked up from 'Black Box' in Crashed China Plane

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Recovery workers have picked up a weak signal from the "black box" flight recorder inside a China Northern Airlines plane which crashed into the sea off northeast China killing 112 people, investigators said Thursday.

Recovery workers said they have located the black box recording the flight log.

With the help of a sonar system, the searching team received the radio signal from the black box at a place about 600 meters north of Dalian Harbor at 11:00 Thursday morning.

"The humming of the black box can be clearly heard in earphones," said a member of the team.

Experts said the black box is able to automatically send signals at the frequency of 37.5 kilohertz within 30 days after the crash of the plane.

The team is narrowing the scope of their search. Once the exact spot is determined, divers will be sent down to pick up the recording device.

However, at present the searching work is still pretty difficult, said Shan Qunchang, vice director of the State Administration for Supervision of Production Safety.

In all, 60 ships and 50 divers were scouring waters off the coast of Dalian city, where flight CJ 6136 crashed late Tuesday, minutes after the captain reported a fire on board.

Several dozen parts of the twin-engined MD-82 plane had been found in the water, Shan said.

A total of 66 bodies had been recovered, he added.

Chinese state television said Thursday that the remainder of the bodies were thought to still be inside a main fuselage section of the plane underwater.

A top-level investigation team has begun looking into the cause of the crash.

It is the second fatal accident to hit Chinese airlines in a month, after an Air China Boeing 767 ploughed into a fog-shrouded mountain near the southern city of Busan in South Korea on April 15, killing 129 people.

The inquiry into the Dalian crash is to be assisted by a team from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), with representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, and Pratt and Whitney Engines, the NTSB said in a statement on Wednesday.

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