Russian Defense Ministry officials have started publicly unsealing the fight data recorder from the Russian Sukhoi Su-24 bomber downed by the Turkish Air Force at the Interstate Aviation Committee office in Moscow.

"The flight recorder's cover, which attaches the cable harness that connects the recorder to the plane's systems, is missing because of the ground impact," a Defense Ministry official said in commenting on the unsealing of the Su-24's flight recorder in a live TV program on Dec. 18.

The official pointed out that the cable harness coming out of the recorder was torn off.

"This shows that the data could not have been copied from this device using standard methods," he said.

"Special technology needs to be used to recover and decode the data," the official said, adding that such technology has been developed by the flight recorder's manufacturer.

The exterior inspection "has shown that there is some damage to the recorder's paint coating and some dents," he said.

Out of the eight chips of the memory module from the downed Su-24 black box, three have breakages, the visual examination of the black box suggests.

"Now it can even be determined by eye that out of the eight chips on the upper plate, three have marked breakages with cracks, which is likely to evidence that there is no flight data recorded in them," one of the specialists who opened the black box said. 

It was decided to subject every of the 16 memory cards of the black box to an X-ray radioscopy in a laboratory.