What happened in this Ukrainian Boeing when it was shot down on January 11 in Iran with 176 people on board, all of whom died in the crash? The French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) will look into the black boxes of the aircraft from Monday, which Tehran announces this Saturday that it has sent to Le Bourget, where it is headquartered.
Entrusting these black boxes to the BEA was not easy. The office intervenes automatically when the accident occurred on French territory. When a crash abroad causes French victims, concerns an aircraft operated by a French company or all or part of the equipment of which is built by a French company (Airbus, Snecma), the BEA is also participating in the investigation.
The crash of January 11 does not correspond to any of these scenarios. The aircraft being a Boeing, the black boxes could on the other hand have been sent to the United States, a country also very competent in this area. But Iran categorically refused this hypothesis, for presumably diplomatic reasons.
"Very good cooperation"
The BEA will therefore investigate an accident that does not concern France, and this is not the first time: if the office itself opens more than a hundred investigations a year, the majority of its missions are requests from foreign organizations wishing to have access to its expertise.
The BEA has advanced equipment to analyze the device's parameter recorder and the voice recorder. Its investigations consist in establishing the certain or possible causes of an accident, not in releasing responsibilities, a prerogative of the judicial investigation. This is why a judicial police officer or a judicial expert must be present during the examination of the black boxes.
BEA reported last month that Iran had formally requested technical assistance from Iran to repair and download the black box data. "The French government has had very good cooperation with the Iranian delegation, for which I thank France," said Mohsen Baharvand, deputy foreign minister in charge of legal and international affairs, on Saturday.
" Human error "
The Iranian armed forces admitted on January 11 that they had “mistakenly” shot down three days earlier the Boeing flying Ukrainian Airlines flight PS 752 between Tehran and Kiev shortly after taking off from Tehran International Airport. The 176 victims were mostly Iranians and Canadians, many of them binational.
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Boeing shot down in Iran: video shows second missile
The black boxes should contain information about the final moments of the aircraft before it was struck by the two surface-to-air missiles and crashed.
The latest report of the Iranian Civil Aviation published in mid-July indicated that the "key element" at the origin of the drama was a "human error", namely the bad setting of a military radar followed by other malfunctions .
On the day of the accident, Iran's air defenses were on high alert: the Islamic Republic had just fired missiles at an Iraqi base sheltering American soldiers intended to avenge the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani , killed in an American drone strike in Baghdad on January 3.
Iranian Boeing crash: Iran admits responsibility
