Cockpit Tape Confirms Fire on ValuJet Plane

Six minutes into the doomed ValuJet Flight 592, the cockpit door apparently opened and there was conversation about fire in the passenger cabin, the plane’s voice recorder indicated, a National Transportation Safety Board official said Monday.

Robert Francis, NTSB vice chairman, said the passengers also had problems getting oxygen before the plane crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 aboard.

“It appears that the cockpit door opened,” Francis told a news conference. “There were verbal indications from the cockpit there was fire in the passenger cabin. There was also an indication from the cabin that there were problems obtaining oxygen.”

Francis said the tape contains 30 minutes of recorded material, the normal capacity. He said the tape is in good shape but the sound quality is poor and is “very, very difficult to decipher.”

Francis said experts are listening to the tape, but he added: “At this stage we have not had the opportunity to do enough work on the tape to say how much help it’s going to be.”

“It’s not going to be a question of hours but of days” before the experts know if there is more to be learned from the tape, he said.

In Miami, NTSB spokesman Mike Benson said of the voice recorder: “It takes time to handle and get information out of it, and experts need to sit down and listen to it very carefully. We want to make sure we know what we have.”

Benson said the box found in the Everglades muck Sunday was in good condition, but he could not say if it may have gaps because of loss of power on the DC-9.

The data recorder, which was found two days after the crash that killed 105 passengers and five crew members, stopped 50 seconds before the flight ended.

The voice tape could provide details on what happened in the cockpit as the plane crashed, as well as other sounds that could indicate what went wrong.