By Matt Hamilton
As investigators examine what caused a panel on an Alaska Airlines plane bound for Southern California to blow off midflight, forcing an emergency landing in Portland, federal officials Sunday pointed out a major obstacle: The cockpit voice recorder, or black box, from the Friday night flight was erased.
Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference that after Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 returned to Portland International Airport, no one pulled the circuit breaker on the cockpit voice recorder or otherwise preserved the audio, which holds only its most recent two hours.
“The cockpit voice recorder was completely overwritten. There was nothing on the cockpit voice recorder,” Homendy said.
Among other revelations, the NTSB chief also announced that the door plug the agency had been searching for had been found by a Portland teacher. In addition, she said that prior to Friday’s midair incident, the plane had been restricted from long flights over water because of a warning light that had repeatedly gone off in the last month.
Source: L.A. Times
