BEA manages to extract useful data from damaged black box

The French aviation safety organization has managed to extract useful data from damaged black box retrieved from the downed Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed on Tuesday, a senior official said on Wednesday.

Remi Jouty, general director of the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), said at a press conference in Paris that the file extracted from the damaged black box was an audio file.

The last message sent out from the aircraft was a routine message, Jouty revealed, adding that the last altitude of 4U9525 on the radar was about 6,000 feet.

"At the point, we are not in the position to have any explanation of the crash," affirmed the chief of BEA, adding that the whole process of decryption and analysis of the black box can take weeks, even months.

He declined to comment on whether the voice from the audio file was from the pilots.

The BEA said the tiny sizes of the debris corresponded to the situation where the aircraft hit a hard surface at a large angle, adding that if there was an explosion in mid-air, the sizes of the debris would be bigger.