Divers Find Body Parts, ‘Black Box’ at Crash Site

A sharpshooter watching for alligators guarded divers in a steamy Everglades marsh on Monday as they recovered fragmented human remains and a “black box” recording device from the crash of ValuJet flight 592.

“This is tough stuff out there,” said National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Robert Francis, who is heading the investigation of the crash that killed all 109 aboard the DC-9 jetliner Saturday afternoon.

The flight data recorder found in the marsh when a diver stepped on it could provide important clues why Flight 592 crashed.

“It’s as important as anything we can have,” Francis said.

If it is not severely damaged, the device should reveal technical aspects of the last few minutes of flight, including the plane’s heading, altitude, air speed and other information. The device was shipped to the NTSB laboratories in Washington for analysis.

Divers are still searching for Flight 592’s other black box, which records the pilots’ conversations and other sounds in the cockpit.

In Washington, President Clinton ordered Transportation Secretary Frederico Pena to report to him “this week on additional measures the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration can take to ensure that all our airlines continue to operate at the highest level of safety.”

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said Pena will try to determine if he can hire more FAA inspectors promptly to check aircraft and flight procedures. The agency has hired 230 inspectors this year and, he said, the administration has requested funds for 150 more for next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.

Although the U.S. air travel system with 1.5 million passengers a day is the world’s safest, “no one should ever be satisfied completely with the quality of our protections for air travel,” McCurry said.

On Sunday, the FAA announced that it will intensify a review of ValuJet’s safety and maintenance, extending a seven-day examination into a month. Lewis Jordan, who founded ValuJet in 1993 as a low-price airline, said Monday his company welcomed the added FAA scrutiny and said the airline “would never cut a corner on safety. We pay the highest degree of attention to it at all times.”

Officials said it could be days--perhaps weeks--before all the human remains and bits of wreckage are recovered from the marsh.

At least 40 body parts had been recovered and transferred to the Dade County Medical Examiner’s office by midday Monday.

Medical Examiner Joseph Davis said body tissue has been decomposing rapidly in the warm water, and although DNA experts will be brought in to help pathologists, some of the remains may never be identified.

Under a broiling sun, 30 police divers dressed in heavy biohazard protective suits and masks slogged, crawled and swam through the rotting vegetation, oozing mud and murky water at the crash site, using touch more than sight to locate and recover whatever they could find from the doomed flight.

Francis said that because of high humidity and temperatures that soared to nearly 90 degrees, the divers were limited to 30-minute shifts, resting for at least an hour before returning to their grim tasks.

“This is not easy for them,” Francis said. “But this is their work. . . . These people are professionals.”

Francis said a “sniper” armed with “an automatic weapon” was on the lookout for alligators, snakes and other potentially threatening wildlife, but local officials downplayed the danger, saying there was little likelihood of attack.

The largest pieces of debris located so far are the plane’s twin engines and an 8-foot-long chunk of the airframe. Like the rest of the debris, they lie beneath layers of water and muck, resting atop the bed of submerged limestone that serves as the base of the Everglades.

Several plans--building a bridge to a road 300 yards away, erecting dikes and draining the marsh around the crash site, towing in large cranes mounted on barges--have been suggested for speeding the retrieval process, but officials said there all of the proposals have flaws.

Naturalists said a bridge could further damage the fragile Everglades ecology. Hydrologists said water might seep in under any dikes placed on the porous limestone. Investigators said cranes could further mangle the wreckage, destroying important evidence as to why Flight 592 crashed.

Thus far, the cause of the accident remains a mystery.

Officials said that about 10 minutes after the jetliner took off from Miami International Airport on a flight to Atlanta, the co-pilot radioed an urgent message that the cockpit and passenger cabin were rapidly filling with smoke.

He requested and received clearance for an immediate return to Miami. Then, as the plane turned south, the co-pilot asked instead for clearance to land at the nearest airfield--Opa Locka Airport, about 15 miles northwest of Miami.

Greg Feith, the NTSB official managing the field investigation, said the request for an alternate landing site was the last intelligible radio transmission from the jetliner.

Radar data show that the plane started descending gradually, then plunged suddenly into a steep dive, plummeting 7,500 feet to the ground in 40 seconds.

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Rescuers flying over the crash site minutes later said all recognizable signs of the plane and its human cargo had sunk from sight in the marsh.

The report of smoke in the cockpit and cabin before the crash has prompted an intense study of the plane’s maintenance records for a possible history of electrical fires.

Francis said that on Saturday morning, before leaving Atlanta for Miami, electrical circuit breakers on the plane’s fuel pumps malfunctioned, but that problem was thought to have been fixed.

An FAA directive was issued last year ordering the replacement of portions of the cockpit wiring on some DC-9s because of the possibility of short circuits and fires. Whether the plane that crashed was covered by the directive--and whether any mandated repairs were made--was not immediately clear. The compliance deadline for the directive was May 15, 1996.

Times researcher Anna Virtue in Miami and staff writer Robert L. Jackson in Washington contributed to this story.

* INVESTOR CONCERN

Shares of ValuJet and other upstart carriers tumble. D3