The Civil Aviation Organization of Iran published a report on Monday on its government shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet this month admitting that Tehran does not have the technology to retrieve information on the plane’s black boxes and that it requested help from the United States.
Iran has jealously guarded the black boxes, initially denying access to foreign countries to them, then later claiming the boxes were too “damaged” to have kept information. Iranian officials specifically said they would block Boeing, the plane’s manufacturer, and “the Americans” from having access to the boxes.
Iran’s state-run PressTV news agency quoted the Civil Aviation Organization as saying that American officials had not “so far responded positively” to the request for help.
Ukrainian International Airlines (UIA) Flight 752 burst into flames and crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran on January 8, killing all 176 people on board. Iran initially claimed that its investigation revealed “mechanical error” and that the plane had spontaneously combusted. Evidence rapidly surfaced refuting this, instead indicating that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had shot the plane down. The IRGC is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
IRGC fighters shot the plane down while Iran launched over a dozen ballistic missiles at Iraqi military bases in response to the U.S. government eliminating IRGC Quds Force head Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike. Iran admitted to having blown up the plane after refusing to hand over the black boxes, bulldozing the crash site, and still failing to hide overwhelming evidence of the attack. Tehran claims defensive troops confused the plane for an American missile and that it has since arrested unnamed individuals in relation to the mass killing.
PressTV revealed that the civil aviation agency had published a new report this week after disavowing the “mechanical error” conclusion in its preliminary report. Among its findings, the new report “noted that the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder — commonly known as black boxes — feature cutting-edge technology and Iran lacks the technical facilities to decode them.”
“If devices are provided, the information (on the black boxes) can be restored and retrieved in a short period of time,” the report read, according to PressTV, which added, “Iran’s civil aviation agency has requested French and U.S. accident investigation agencies, the BEA and NTSB, respectively, to provide a list of the equipment required to decode the black boxes and to examine the possibility of transferring them to Iran.”
The state media outlet added that the report ominously said neither France nor America had “so far responded positively.”
PressTV also noted that the report, as the preliminary report did, also discounted several possibilities that no experts had suggested regarding the fate of the plane, such as the possibility that it had been shot down by lasers or radioactive rays. It demanded Iranian authorities seek evidence at the crash site of “explosives both inside and outside the aircraft,” a more difficult possibility now that Iranians officials have bulldozed the site.
The report ultimately conceded, however, that the Iranian military admitted to shooting two Russian Tor-M1 surface-to-air missiles at the plane and that the missiles “contributed to the crash,” but how they did so was “still under investigation.”
The black boxes could provide vital insight into the final moments of Flight 752. Iran requesting help from Washington and Paris to unlock them appears to be a step towards openness, though Tehran refuses to give up custody of them, despite extensive efforts from Ukraine. In the immediate aftermath of the mass killing, Iranian officials refused to entertain any possibility of handing the black boxes over, particularly to Boeing or the United States. The weekend after the crash, Ali Abedzadeh, the head of Iran’s Aviation Organization, told reporters at a press conference that his agency needed “special software and hardware which are available in our country, but if we fail to extract the data due to the damages of the black box, we will get help from other countries.”
Hassan Rezaeifar, the official specifically responsible for crash site investigations, suggested that Iran could ship the black boxes to its ally Russia, which is currently embroiled in a years-long war against Ukraine.
Ukraine has continued to insist that the black boxes belong to Kyiv, as the plane itself and its crew were all Ukrainian. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystayko publicly called for the return of the black boxes on Monday.
“We hope that we can go a little further than just political discussions and discuss practical problems. Among them, in particular, is the return of the black boxes,” he said, following a meeting with an Iranian official visiting Kyiv.
“At first they stated that they were handing them over, then the same person stated that they were not handing them over,” he continued. “This created some misunderstanding in Ukraine and we were starting to be asked: ‘Are they being handed over or not?'”
Canadian officials have similarly demanded that Iran hand over the black boxes. Over half of the victims of Iran’s missile attack held Canadian citizenship.
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