Flight 990 Voice Recorder Arrives at Washington Lab

Investigators are hoping that in the next few days the cockpit voice recorder recovered from EgyptAir Flight 990 will help tell investigators why the jet crashed, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.

“We’re certainly hopeful that within the next two or three days that we’ll be able to answer a lot of the puzzling questions that the information on the flight data recorder has raised in our minds,” Jim Hall said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“We have the best experts in the world, I believe,” he said. “They will be looking at this tape, evaluating it, and I’m praying that we will have a good tape.”

The recorder, recovered at 10:12 p.m. EST Saturday from the midst of the wreckage deep in the Atlantic, arrived Sunday at the NTSB laboratory in Washington, where experts hope to answer questions about the Oct. 31 crash.

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

Barry Mawn, an FBI special agent, said on NBC that more than 250 agents are working with the NTSB. The FBI has “no evidence at this particular point in time that a crime was committed,” he said.

The recorder, which was bent on one side, was found not far from where investigators detected a signal from its pinger, which had become detached. A name plate identifying the box also was missing.

A remote-controlled underwater robot recovered the recorder, Navy Rear Adm. William Sutton said. The so-called black box was hauled up within minutes.

EgyptAir and civil aviation officials from Egypt planned to help NTSB officials in Washington with translations of any cockpit conversations in Arabic.

An EgyptAir official has said the cockpit voice recorder had a tape that records over itself every 30 minutes, which should be long enough to capture conversations as the plane climbed to 33,000 feet and then began to plummet about 40 minutes after the flight took off from New York, bound for Cairo.

The Boeing 767 crashed in the ocean off Nantucket, Mass., killing all 217 people aboard.