Flight recorders recovered after crash of West Atlantic CRJ200 in Sweden

Following the crash of a West Atlantic Bombardier CRJ200 in Sweden late at night on January 7th , Swedish accident investigators have confirmed that though extensively damaged, both the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) together with it memory functions, have now all been recovered from the crash site.
Flight PT294 of the European mail and express freight carrier West Atlantic, based in Gothenburg, was en route from Oslo to Tromso, Norway late on January 7th when mayday was declared by the pilots. The aircraft disappeared from radar at 11:31 p.m. local time, approximately 20 minutes after taking off. The crash site was discovered four hours later on the border between Sweden and Norway in a mountainous region 124 miles northwest of Gällivare.
While there has been no speculation surrounding the reason for the crash which killed both pilots, the relatively small size of the impact crater would indicate that the plane hit the ground at a steep angle. Statens haverikommission (SHK), the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority confirmed that on the 9th January 1.5m3 of liquid, predominantly fuel, had been pumped out of the impact crater and that the FDR, followed by the CVR had been recovered. However, the memory functions of the CVR were not discovered until the 10th owing to the damage inflicted upon the recorders.
Despite this, SHK’s deputy director-general and chairman of the investigation, Jonas Bäckstrand, remained optimistic that the data could still be extracted, confirming that with the recovery of the two recorders, “it will be possible to determine why the aircraft crashed.” While it is not normal procedure for SHK to issue a preliminary report into a crash, Bäckstrand said that an exception might be made because of public interest in this crash, indicating that a final report would usually be issued 10-12 months following such an accident.