AFP
The black box voice recorder from an Armenian Airbus passenger plane that crashed in the Black Sea earlier this month has been raised from the sea bed, an official at the Russian transport ministry said Monday."We found the black box yesterday during the night," a source at the ministry, who asked not to be named, told AFP.
All 113 passengers and crew died when the Armavia airlines Airbus A320, which had taken off from Yerevan, crashed May 3 during its approach to Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi. Eighty-five of the victims were Armenians, many of them on family visits.
The transport ministry source said the recovered black box was "the one with voice recordings and was lying 25 to 50 centimeters (10 to 20 inches) under the mud. This evening we should find the flight data recorder, which should lie about five meters away."
A submersible vessel has been used to search for the flight recorders, which were reported to be lying at a depth of some 500 meters (1,600 feet) below the surface.