Originally Posted by
bsieker
The recorders will almost certainly not be serviceable, i. e. they will be destroyed and will not work.
But the memory modules will almost certainly still be readable; they are in some of the toughest enclosures you can imagine, they can protect the memory from shock in excess of 1000 G acceleration, and prolonged hot fires. It is the enclosures' only job to protect the memory modules in precisely this kind of situation. This looks like a head-on crash with a velocity not too different from the Germanwings murder-suicide, so the entire aircraft acts as a crumple-zone reducing the acceleration experienced by the recorders.
The problem will be to find them. This can take weeks.
Doing a quick and dirty calculation on the g force the black box is likely to have experienced on impact (based on velocity figures that were calculated earlier in the thread), the memory modules will have survived by a fairly comfortable margin