Home › Politics › What the PS 752 black boxes revealed
What the PS 752 black boxes revealed
Summary
A French investigation agency's reading of the damaged recorders from the airliner downed near Tehran came days after Ukraine's Lutsk bus hostage crisis.
What did the black boxes of flight PS 752 show? On 24 July 2020, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry reported that France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) had successfully read and decoded the damaged recorders from the aircraft, which was shot down near Tehran on 8 January.
According to the ministry, the transcript confirmed that there had been unlawful interference in the operation of the aircraft. That was the point Kyiv stressed on the day, and it placed the successful data recovery at the centre of the continuing investigation into the downing.
A tense week in Ukraine
The announcement followed another event that had held the country's attention. On 21 July 2020, a gunman carrying explosives took 16 people hostage aboard a public bus in Lutsk. Police identified him; he had voiced frustration with the Ukrainian system on social media. Background on the episode describes him as Maksym Kryvosh, who barricaded himself in the bus at Teatralna Square.
After hours of negotiations, the gunman surrendered and all the hostages were freed unharmed. Shortly before the surrender, the President, Volodymyr Zelensky, met one of the gunman's demands by posting a video on Facebook urging people to watch the 2005 film Earthlings.
Why the two stories mattered
The two stories were unrelated, but both tested the Ukrainian authorities on 21 and 24 July 2020: one in crisis negotiation at home, the other in diplomacy and investigation over the loss of a Ukrainian airliner abroad. The reading of the recorders gave Kyiv a documented basis for its claim of unlawful interference, while the Lutsk standoff ended without casualties.
