NEWPORT, R.I. -- Investigators set to work Sunday on the cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990, hoping the second so-called black box retrieved from the ocean floor would help explain the airliner's mysterious plunge from the sky.
After a two-week search, the recorder was found Saturday night by a remote-operated robot, and on Sunday it was delivered to National Transportation Safety Board headquarters in Washington.NTSB Chairman James Hall said scientists would begin analyzing the recorder immediately to see if its tape was damaged by the destruction of the plane or by its lengthy submersion at a depth of 250 feet.
"I think within the next 24 hours we will be able to characterize the contents on the tape," Hall said.
Civil aviation officials from Egypt and Arabic linguists from the State Department were available to help translate any cockpit conversations in Arabic, Hall said.
If the tape is badly damaged, it will likely be taken to its manufacturer, where more sophisticated equipment could be used to pick up sounds, Hall said.
The New York-to-Cairo jetliner crashed off Massachusetts' Nantucket Island on Oct. 31, killing all 217 people aboard.
Preliminary data from the plane's flight data recorder showed that the Boeing 767's autopilot was switched off and the plane was put into a dive so steep and fast that passengers would briefly have felt weightless. And both engines were shut off before the aircraft climbed briefly out of its dive and then turned
and dropped into the ocean.
Barry Schiff, a former TWA 767 pilot from Los Angeles and currently an aviation accident investigator, has said the data shows that some human factor was responsible rather than some system failure.
Investigators hope the voice tape will reveal cockpit conversations or mechanical sounds that will shed light on those events.
"We're certainly hopeful that within the next two or three days that we'll be able to answer a lot of the puzzling questions that the information on the flight data recorder has raised in our minds," Hall said Sunday.
An EgyptAir official said the cockpit voice recorder records over its tape every 30 minutes, unlike the two-hour digital models recommended by the NTSB. The tape should have lasted long enough to record conversations as the plane climbed to its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet and then plummeted about 40 minutes after takeoff.
The cockpit voice recorder was found amid the plane's debris by Deep Drone, a remote-controlled robot, a day before bad weather in the search area threatened to halt the search again.
The recorder, which was bent on one side, was found not far from where investigators detected the pinging signal from its sonar locater beacon, which had become detached from the recorder.
The head of the FBI's Boston office, Barry Mawn, said more than 250 FBI agents had conducted several hundred interviews related to the crash but that there was no evidence yet that a crime had been committed.
However, if it becomes apparent that a crime occurred, Mawn said, the FBI would take over as the lead agency in the crash investigation.