“I saw something orange peeking up from the snow,” said army captain Carl-Johan Olofsson to the Aftonbladet newspaper.

The Hercules military plane crashed straight into Sweden’s highest peak Kebnekaise during an exercise this spring, and all five of the Norwegian officers on board were killed.

Why the plane crashed has so far been a mystery.

Now the black box which contains a recording of everything said inside the cock pit has been found, the result of a week’s intensive searching by the army’s ranger battalion, the police and the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority (Statens haverikommission).

“When I dug it up I immediately saw that we’d found the right thing, as ‘voice recorder’ is written on the unit,” said Olofsson.

The find may finally be able to solve the puzzle.

“It’s fantastic that they’ve found it. If the information is legible, which it probably is, we’ll be able to obtain fundamental information. We may even receive the explanation for the crash,” said flight safety expert Hans Kjäll to Aftonbladet.

The Swedish Accident Investigation Authority has previously said that the black boxes, once found, are to be sent to Britain for analysis.