‘Black Box’ of Crashed Plane Found in Ocean

A robot submarine plucked the cockpit voice recorder of Air-India Flight 182 from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean today, raising hopes that the mystery of the crash can be solved.

The craft continued to hunt for the “black box” in-flight recorder, which keeps a continuous record of crucial instrument readings.

The cockpit voice recorder may have taped whatever conversation took place the last moments before the Boeing 747 crashed 100 miles off Ireland on June 23, killing 329 people.

Investigators hope that the voice recorder and the flight data recorder--presumed to be nearby on the ocean floor--will explain why the plane crashed without giving a distress signal. Officials suspect a terrorist bomb blew the jet out of the sky.

May Not Help

But a U.S. federal aviation source in Washington said it was possible the voice recorder would not be able to help the investigation because the radar at the Shannon, Ireland, airport lost the plane’s signal suddenly--an indication the plane lost electricity as it fell.

“These recorders don’t work without electricity, so whether there’s going to be much or anything on them is an open question,” the source said.

The voice recorder is to be returned to India for examination, Indian officials leading the crash investigation told reporters at the search headquarters in this southern Irish city.

The recorder, which picks up conversations and any alarms in the cockpit, was salvaged by a robot submersible called Scarab 1, which cruised the sea bottom at the end of a tether from the French cable-laying vessel Leon Thevenin.

Arm Retrieves Box

It was the first time such a recorder had been retrieved from such a depth, said H. S. Khola, India’s director of Aviation Safety.

After the recorder’s sound-emitting beacon was detected, Scarab was maneuvered close enough to see the recorder with its television camera and grab the box with one of its two manipulator arms.

The craft and recorder were brought to the surface at 8 a.m., officials said.

The recorder “is in fairly good shape,” Khola told the Associated Press. “Right now, it is lying on the deck of the ship. Now they are busy looking for the second box,” Khola said.