U.S. transportation safety investigators arrived on Thursday in Afghanistan to try and help determine why a civilian operated Boeing 747 cargo jet crashed on takeoff from Bagram Air Base, killing all seven crew aboard.
Senior aviation investigator Tim LeBaron is leading a team from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that is working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Boeing, which made the jumbo jet that crashed on Monday.
The safety board is an independent government agency that investigates transportation accidents in the United States and often assists foreign governments in major cases, especially in air crashes involving a plane made by an American manufacturer.
Afghanistan’s transportation ministry is leading the probe, the safety board said in a statement.
A priority for crash investigators is to recover the jet’s “black boxes,” the flight data and cockpit voice recorders that could provide clues to a potential cause.
The final moments of the doomed plane appear to have been captured by a dashboard camera inside a vehicle that was in the area.
The approximately three-minute video shows what appears to be the jet starting its climb at 11:20 a.m. local time from the base.
About 12 seconds into the video, it appears to stall, rolls from side to side, and drops.
At 23 seconds, the plane crashes nose first into the ground off the side of the road, erupting into a ball of orange flame and black smoke.
