Originally Posted by atakacs
Interesting info but doesn't tell why the admittedly well equipped BEA could not read those recorders from a fairly modern Airbus...
Physical damage ? Data corruption ?
Really mysterious...
Maybe we'll be told one day.
Trust me, there's nothing mysterious about it.
Once you have to go into the innards, you really go on tiptoe.
The BEA press release said they had to read the memory boards. Sounds already as if they were lucky and did not have to try and read each chip....
Now, one) reading a memory board from a specific manufacturer needs a fair amount of hardware and software,which BEA would not necessarily have in place, and two) the bits and bytes from the memories are meaningless, until you have the full decoding software to translate them to the actual parameters being recorded, which can also vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.
CJ