Explosion Inside Jet Possible, Official Says

A National Transportation Safety Board official said Tuesday night that “there could have been an explosion” aboard ValuJet Flight 592 3 1/2 minutes before the jetliner nosed over and plunged into an Everglades marsh, killing all 109 aboard.

Board Vice Chairman Robert Francis said that preliminary information from the plane’s “black box” flight data recorder, recovered Monday from the crash site, showed an “anomaly”--a sudden indicated drop in both altitude and air speed about 10 minutes after the plane took off from Miami International Airport on Saturday.

But sources close to the investigation said these drops in speed and altitude could have been illusory, and the readings could have been caused instead by a sudden increase in pressure within the airplane--the sort of increase that could have been caused by a moderate on-board explosion.

Francis said that cargo manifests show that a compartment below and behind the cockpit held 50 to 60 oxygen generators--bottles containing chemicals used to produce oxygen in the event of a plane’s sudden decompression. In this case, he said, the bottles were being carried as cargo.

Francis said investigators were looking at the possibility that one or more of these bottles exploded. In such a scenario, a sudden burst of oxygen could quickly lead to a highly destructive fire.

He noted that the cargo hold also contained three large rubber aircraft tires. When rubber burns it gives off a great deal of smoke and soot.

Sources close to the investigation said Tuesday night that an oxygen generator caused a fire in an empty DC-10 parked at a airport gate in Chicago in the late 1980s that destroyed the aircraft. No other information on that incident was immediately available.

Not long after the “anomaly” on Flight 592, the co-pilot radioed air traffic controllers, first requesting an immediate return to Miami and later reporting that the cockpit and passenger cabin were rapidly filling with smoke.

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Francis said some cabin interior materials and a floor beam, believed to be from the forward part of the aircraft, were recovered from the marsh on Tuesday, both with apparent soot damage.

Francis stressed that the information from the data recorder has not been fully analyzed and that the agency is not drawing any conclusions. Officials confirmed that the FBI is a party to the investigation but they did not say why. The FBI declined comment.

Very little of the plane itself has been recovered so far from the opaque marsh. On Tuesday, divers continued to search for the jetliner’s other black box, which records conversations and other sounds in the cockpit.

Sonar detection systems, designed to home in on the cockpit recorder’s electronic locator signal, won’t work if the missing device is buried in the muck on the floor of the marsh, officials said.

Divers recovered more small pieces of wreckage from the marsh on Tuesday. Larger chunks remained in place as engineers tried to figure out the best means of lifting them and transporting them out of the remote, ecologically sensitive crash site.

“It’s a very, very complex engineering situation,” Francis said. “We’re going to take our time, to avoid any effort that might lead us up the wrong road.”

Frank Hilldrup, coordinator of the recovery effort, said most of the debris was believed to be at the bottom of a crater that Flight 592 carved in the floor of the marsh, which is about chest deep in most places.

Lt. Glen Kay of the Metro-Dade Police Department said Tuesday that a lot more fragmented human remains were being found and transported to a morgue in Miami for identification, but he declined to say how many. About 40 body parts were found when the search began Sunday, and Kay said the rate of retrieval has increased since then.

The flight data recorder--discovered in a stroke of luck when a diver stumbled onto it Monday afternoon--indicated the following sequence of events, according to Francis:

* The flight was proceeding normally when the indicated drops in altitude and airspeed were recorded. This “anomaly” lasted three to four seconds.

* From that point on the data recorder worked only intermittently. Investigators said this could have been caused by some sort of electrical failure.

* Twenty-three seconds after the anomaly, the right engine lost a significant amount of thrust (power) and the left engine lost a little thrust.

* About 2 1/2 minutes before the crash, the data recorder stopped functioning altogether. Investigators who have studied many crashes say this is unusual, indicating the possible total loss of electrical power on the airplane.

Francis said radar recordings show that the jetliner began its steep plunge into the marsh after the data recorder stopped working.

Officials said Tuesday night that plans were being made to take relatives of the victims out to the crash site today after numerous requests from the families to do so.

The tedious search for victims was wearing on relatives, about 75 of whom are being put up by ValuJet at a hotel near Miami International Airport.

“I’d like to leave Miami seeing my mother deceased or alive, and to be able to hold something she had,” said Gerald Walker, the 14-year-old son of Flight 592 passenger Delmarie Walker. Walker, a 38-year-old waitress, had been in Miami to visit a friend and look for work, and was returning to her home in Atlanta when the jetliner crashed.

“I’d recognize her luggage, or a piece of clothing that she had,” Gerald said. “Anything.”

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Counselors have been brought in to help relatives deal with their anguish.

“It is easier if you have something tangible,” said M. Virginia Cummock, who has gained expertise in counseling survivors during the 7 1/2 years since her husband, John, was killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

“Right now these people are in shock,” Cummock said. “They are not grieving yet, and they won’t until they have their loved one’s body. That gives them permission to grieve.”

For many of those waiting at the Miami hotel, what happened is difficult to visualize. Some of them have expressed interest in flying over the watery grave site, according to Cummock.

“It’s so hard to conceive that their family members, and a whole plane, is just gone,” she said.