The black boxes on board Air India Express Flight 1344 have been retrieved

An Air India Express Boeing 737-800 similar to the one involved. Photo by Franz from Wikimedia Commons

The Civil Aviation Ministry's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has retrieved the wrecked Air India Express Flight 1344's black box and the cockpit voice recorder on Saturday. Indian air crash investigators managed to retrieve the flight recorders by cutting into the floorboard in the cockpit, and the recorders were sent to Delhi for decoding and analysis.

Air India Express Flight 1344 was operating a repatriation flight for Indian citizens stranded in Dubai due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Flight 1344 departed from Dubai at 10:00 UTC. The pilot attempted to land in bad weather conditions twice, and, on the final attempt, the plane touched down but overshot the runway. Of the 184 passengers and 6 crew on board, 18 people died, including both pilots, and 138 received injuries of varying degrees with 15 of them in critical condition.

Head of India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Arun Kumar, said that the country would open the recovered transcripts to international investigators as well as the American aircraft manufacturer, Boeing. "Only after conducting a thorough and unbiased probe, can we tell what exactly happened," Kumar said.

Air India Express Flight 1344 aligned for Runway 10 at Kozhikode Airport but made a left turn and descended to land on Runway 28. But at approximately 1000ft, the pilot went around and requested to land on Runway 10. Flight 1344 was then cleared for ILS landing on Runway 10, but unfortunately, the plane overshot the runway and crashed in a valley.

The 2700m runway at Kozhikode Airport was known as a "table-top" runway because at both ends of the runway, there were steep drops, leaving little room for error should there be a runway excursion.

It indicated that wind was blowing from 260°, which meant that Flight 1344 landed with 11 knots tailwind. Typically, pilots would land and depart in a headwind as tailwind increases the airplane speed, making it harder to land. Air India Express says the captain of Flight 1344 was an experienced Boeing 737-800 pilots, with close to 10,000 flight hours on the Boeing 737-800. The captain once flew the Airbus A310 and was an accomplished fighter pilot. Many are citing his actions as the main reason why there were not more fatalities in this accident. There will hopefully be more information into the cause of this accident soon.