Gray Zone Warfare Too Close to the Sun quest guide: How to retrieve the flight recorder

Not a smooth landing.

Crashed plane location of the flight recorder in GZW.
Screenshot by Dot Esports

Too Close to the Sun is one of several tasks in Gray Zone Warfare that gives you a choice between the kind of rewards you want, letting you take up space in your locker the way you want to.

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Gray Zone Warfare players that have received the task Too Close to the Sun from Lab Rat most likely also have the task What Comes Up from Handshake in their active task list. Both tasks ask you to fulfill same objective: Retrieve a flight recorder from a crashed plane.

Regardless of who you choose to turn it into, you’re still going to need to go traverse through the forest to find what you’re looking for.

Where to the find the flight recorder in Gray Zone Warfare

Marked location of crashed plane and flight recorder in Gray Zone Warfare.
In the middle of nowhere. Screenshot by Dot Esports.

The flight recorder is located in the wreckage of a small, single engine plane that’s crashed in a forest clearing to the southwest of Pha Lang and southeast of Pha Lang Airfield, at map coordinates (192, 152). It’s on the south side of a small section of forest separating the road and the river.

Players in the Lamang Recovery Institute faction will have a huge advantage on this task, as they can take a helicopter to the close and relatively safe Alpha 3 landing zone, and just cut a path directly southwest through the forest. You’ll meet minimal if any enemy AI resistance, and it’s not a common area for enemy faction players either.

Forest interior of Gray Zone Warfare.
You’re gonna see a lot of this while finding this plane. Screenshot by Dot Esports.

For other faction members, it’s going to take a bit longer to reach the objective. Your closest landing zone at first will likely be the northern Ban Pa landing zone, and you’ll need to follow the road northwest a ways to reach the crashed plane.

Once you reach the plane, you will need to find a black box in the separated tail and put it in your inventory. Stick it in your SafeLock container if you can so that it stays with you if you die. Back at base, if you choose to complete Too Close to the Sun, you will receive three ORI-12 medical injectors, $7K, reputation with Lab Rat, and experience.

Author
Image of Scott Robertson
Scott Robertson
VALORANT lead staff writer, also covering CS:GO, FPS games, other titles, and the wider esports industry. Watching and writing esports since 2014. Previously wrote for Dexerto, Upcomer, Splyce, and somehow MySpace. Jack of all games, master of none.