EgyptAir Cockpit Voice Recorder Is Recovered

The Navy recovered the cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990 Saturday, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said.

NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said the cockpit voice recorder was recovered at 10:12 p.m. It was found amid the wreckage deep in the Atlantic Ocean, and its “pinger” was detached from the box, he said.

Navy Rear Adm. William Sutton said the cockpit voice recorder was recovered by Deep Drone, a remote-controlled underwater robot. The so-called black box was hauled up within minutes and taken aboard the Grapple, where it was to be held overnight. It was bent on one side and found close to where the pinger was heard, officials said.

Today, the box was to be taken to the nearby Navy ship Austin and taken by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. From there, the box was to be driven to the NTSB laboratory in Washington for analysis.

EgyptAir officials will be helping NTSB investigators interpret the information, Hall said.

The flight data recorder, which was retrieved Tuesday, and the cockpit voice recorder, also called “black boxes,” may tell investigators what doomed the Boeing 767 that crashed Oct. 31 in the ocean off the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard.

NTSB officials continue to focus on all possible causes for the crash, including mechanical problems. Officials say they are not leaning toward any specific theory.

Investigators were hoping the voice recorder would provide answers to questions raised by information gleaned from the flight data recorder.

Preliminary data released Friday by the NTSB showed that the plane was put into a dive so steep and fast that passengers would briefly have been rendered weightless. And both engines were shut off before the aircraft climbed briefly out of its dive and then turned and plunged into the ocean.

One veteran pilot said the actions taken on the Boeing 767, such as shutting off the engines, seemed to be the exact opposite of what would be done by someone who was trying to save the airplane.

Another former pilot, Barry Schiff of Los Angeles, who is currently an aviation accident investigator, said the data show that some human factor was responsible rather than some system failure.

“I racked my brain, and I can’t think of any emergency that would lead to these maneuvers,” said Schiff.

The pilots suggested that the wild roller-coaster maneuvers could be evidence of a struggle for the controls, perhaps during a skyjacking or a suicide attempt.

“Those are contrary moves with contrary motives indicative of a struggle in the cockpit,” Schiff said.

But they noted that, while anyone could put the plane into a dive, only someone who had knowledge of the cockpit layout on a commercial airliner would be able to figure out how to shut down the engines.

NTSB officials said investigators would travel to the Boeing Co. in Seattle this week to use a 767 flight simulator. NTSB investigator Greg Phillips said information from Flight 990’s data recorder would be entered into the simulator to study how the airplane would react.

The flight data also showed the plane’s elevators--the flaps on the plane’s tail that bend down or up to raise or lift the plane’s nose--were uneven during the descent, indicating a major problem.

The elevators are designed to operate in unison. Investigators are trying to determine if the elevator split was caused by the plane’s breakup, a jamming problem in one of the elevators, crew panic or even a struggle for control in the cockpit.

In 1997 in Southeast Asia, a SilkAir Boeing 737 crashed en route to Jakarta from Singapore, killing all 104 people on board. The pilot was described as having experienced personal problems and apparently manually set the plane to crash.