Canadian Divers Find Flight Data Recorder

In a discovery that promises to provide valuable clues to the cause of the crash of Swissair Flight 111, Canadian navy divers Sunday afternoon recovered the flight data recorder from an undersea debris field that also includes three large pieces of the aircraft’s fuselage.

“It’s a very important step in the progression of this investigation,” said Vic Gerden, who is leading the probe for the Canadian Transportation Safety Board.

The device records about 100 types of data on an aircraft’s systems and controls. Safety board officials said late Sunday that the recorder sustained little visible damage from the crash and was en route to a government laboratory in Ottawa for examination and data retrieval. Gerden said he hopes to complete preliminary analysis of the information within days.

The MD-11 aircraft was on a flight from New York to Geneva on Wednesday night when it radioed a distress call of smoke in the cockpit and began preparations for an emergency landing in Halifax. After the pilot looped the plane away from Halifax, apparently to dump excess fuel and descend to a better landing altitude, communication with air traffic controllers stopped and the jetliner plunged into the Atlantic Ocean just off the hamlet of Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia. All 229 people on board were killed.

Divers had to battle strong currents and poor visibility Sunday as they brought up the flight data device from the rocky sea bottom 180 feet down. The difficult conditions limited the amount of time divers could spend on the ocean floor to about six minutes per dive, navy Capt. Phil Webster said.

An audio signal emitted by the recorder led divers, equipped with sonar devices, to the so-called black box after two days of searching, Webster said. It was found about five miles off Peggy’s Cove.

Conditions permitting, the divers will return to the area today and search for the cockpit voice recorder, which should have a record of everything said on the flight deck during the last disastrous minutes. Like the data recorder, the voice recorder is equipped with an automatic signal discernible by sonar.

Webster said the divers did not approach the pieces of fuselage spotted Sunday. He described one as 40 to 50 feet long and another as 25 to 30 feet in length. No details were available about the third section. He added that the navy will map the debris field with sonar and send a remote video camera into the area to decide whether it is safe for divers to explore the large pieces of wreckage.

Officials said it was too early to tell if any bodies are in the wreckage.

To assist in the salvage operation, the U.S. Navy on Sunday dispatched the recovery ship Grapple from Philadelphia. The vessel, capable of lifting 300 tons, retrieved pieces of the TWA aircraft that exploded and crashed off Long Island in July 1996. The Grapple is scheduled to arrive here Wednesday.

In addition, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they had asked for assistance from the U.S. Defense Department in completing DNA identification of victims. Nearly all of the dead will need to be identified through DNA testing because only two recognizable bodies have been discovered so far, said Dr. John Butt, the chief medical examiner.

Mounted Police Chief Supt. Steve Duncan said use of American DNA labs in addition to Canadian facilities would speed up the identification process.

Butt told reporters Sunday that some relatives of the deceased were having difficulty accepting that they would not be able to escort the bodies of loved ones home for burial. He had met three times with the more than 300 family members here to explain that the impact of the crash left most of the passengers “fragmented.”

The only identification completed so far was on the one fully intact body, that of a French woman, Butt said.

Butt also denied reports by some searchers that the bodies of some passengers had been wearing life jackets when recovered, suggesting that they had been alerted by the cockpit to the possibility of a water landing. He said even if some had been wearing life vests, those would have been torn off by the violence of the crash.

In other developments Sunday:

* Butt and Gerden said they had found no evidence of burns or smoke inhalation on the victims or soot or burn marks on the debris, suggesting that there was no explosion before the plane struck the water. At least one witness on the ground has reported a fire or a glow coming from the plane.

* Gerden said a British Airways crew that monitored the Swissair flight’s radio contact with air traffic controllers reported to authorities that they did not regard the communication as particularly alarming when it began and detected no panic in the voices of the Swissair crew.

According to recordings of radio transmissions released Saturday, the Swissair crew coolly prepared for an emergency landing for 10 minutes after sending out a first distress call. Six minutes before the crash, they suddenly declared an emergency and said, “We have to land immediately.” Communications then stopped, and the plane spiraled 9,700 feet in its fatal dive. The recording suggests that the crew members suddenly were overwhelmed by events and lost control or that they at first underestimated the severity of the problem.

* Reacting to criticism that, after calling for help, the pilot turned back out to sea to dump fuel instead of heading straight into the Halifax airport, Swissair announced in Zurich, Switzerland, that a simulation it had conducted showed that the plane was too high and had too much fuel on board to make a direct approach. Had it done so, it would have overshot the runway by 60 miles, according to Swissair’s chief pilot, Rainer Hiltebrand.

* At St. John’s Anglican Church in Peggy’s Cove, the Rev. Richard Walsh devoted his sermon to the crash and the effect it has had on residents. “Every time we drive by the ocean or the rocks, we will remember the people who have become spiritually part of our community. . . . We will never forget.”