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World - Americas

Swissair flight recorder lacks plane's final minutes

Signal from voice recorder detected

data recorder
The recovered 'black box' (top) and the interior portion that contains flight data
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Carl Rochelle reports on the search and recovery
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 ALSO:
Names of Swissair crash victims
 
September 8, 1998
Web posted at: 5:38 a.m. EDT (0938 GMT)

In this story:

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (CNN) -- The flight-data recorder recovered near the wreckage of Swissair Flight 111 contains no information from the crucial final minutes before the plane crashed, investigators said Monday.

Canadian Transportation Safety Board chief investigator Vic Gerden said the flight data recorder, which was found intact Sunday, had not recorded any information below 10,000 feet.

The setback offset the news that a Canadian navy submarine has detected a signal from the plane's other "black box" -- the cockpit-voice recorder.

Gerden said the flight-data recorder retrieved Sunday was in good condition and should provide more than 100 types of information ranging from altitude and airspeed to whether the plane's smoke warning lights were on.

But he said there was no data from at least the last six minutes before the MD-11 jumbo jet plunged into the ocean off Nova Scotia on Wednesday night, killing all 229 people aboard.

Gerden said the data recording stopped once the plane dipped below 10,000 feet. A strong possibility, he said, was that the plane lost electrical power at that stage.

That could make it difficult for investigators to determine exactly what happened in the last minutes of the flight. When the plane lost radio contact with air traffic controllers in Moncton, New Brunswick, it was flying at about 10,000 feet.

Submarine locates recorder

At the crash site 5 miles offshore, divers equipped with hand-held sonar searched 190 feet underwater Monday for the cockpit voice recorder.

Pinging signals from the cockpit recorder, which records sounds on the flight deck, were detected early Monday by a Canadian navy submarine, HMCS Okanagan, operating off the fishing hamlet of Peggy's Cove, about 25 miles south of Halifax.

"At the moment, the cockpit voice recorder has not yet been recovered, Gerden said. "There is an acoustic signal that has been detected near the location of where the flight data recorder was found."

Grapple
The salvage ship Grapple, which aided in the recovery of TWA Flight 800 wreckage two years ago, is on its way to Halifax  

If retrieved intact, the voice recorder would reveal other noises in the cockpit besides the pilots' conversation with controllers, portions of which were released Saturday. That conversation was cut off 10 minutes after the pilots reported smoke in the cockpit and six minutes before the crash.

Divers also were trying to confirm if three large pieces of wreckage found near the flight data recorder are sections of the plane's fuselage. Searchers were awaiting the arrival Wednesday of the U.S. Navy salvage ship USS Grapple, which will assist in the operation.

Although officials have declined to give an updated figure of how many bodies have been recovered from the crash site, they have indicated that most remain in the sea. Recovery of the fuselage could lead to recovery of many more bodies, officials said.

The head of the team of pathologists handling the remains of passengers and crew, Dr. John Butt, has said that very few bodies are likely to be found intact due to the impact of the crash.

Meanwhile, in a scare Monday night that was reminiscent of last week's crash, a charter plane belonging to a subsidiary of Swissair's parent company returned to Halifax shortly after reporting smoke in its galley.

The Balair/CTA Airbus A-310 was on a flight from Zurich to Vancouver via a scheduled stop in Halifax with 144 passengers on board, SAirGroup spokeswoman Beatrice Tschanz said in Zurich. The smoke was caused by a short-circuit, she said.

"It was not an emergency landing" and went without any problems, Tschanz said. The plane continued to Vancouver early today, she said.

Divers make dramatic ascent

Also Monday, Navy officers revealed dramatic details about Sunday's retrieval of the data recorder. Capt. Phil Webster said one of the two divers developed a leak in his suit, and the pair had to make an ascent -- clutching the black box -- much more rapidly than normal.

One of the divers became ill from the rapid change in pressure. Both were put in a decompression chamber, then taken to a hospital. Webster said both are recovering at home.

church service
A service was held Sunday for victims' families  

Meanwhile, the plane's manufacturer acknowledged that much of the electrical wiring aboard the plane was insulated with aromatic polymide tape, known by the trade name Kapton, which has been banned from use in U.S. Navy planes.

Boeing Co. spokeswoman Susan Bradley said all the general-purpose wiring aboard the plane was insulated with Kapton.

Air Safety Week, an industry newsletter, reported Monday that the U.S. Navy banned Kapton from its aircraft because of poor performance.

The Geneva-bound Swissair plane crashed 16 minutes after the pilots reported the smoke and decided to attempt an emergency landing more than an hour after leaving New York's Kennedy International Airport.

At the start of the emergency, the jet was flying at an altitude of 33,000 feet.

Stress counselors on hand

After reporting an emergency, the plane started toward the Halifax airport, but made two sharp turns as it tried to descend and dump fuel.

Swissair officials say the plane couldn't have made a direct approach to Halifax because it was flying too high and was too heavy with 30 tons of fuel. Swissair said the call was made 70 miles out of Halifax, but the pilots would have needed 130 miles to make a direct landing.

Cheryl Klein and her brother, Abe, whose father was killed, blamed the pilot for the crash.

"I think he wasted valuable time when he made that big circle to dump," said Cheryl.

Several hundred family members have come to the area to visit Peggy's Cove, attend memorial services and assist medical teams in trying to identify human remains retrieved by searchers.

More than 1,400 military personnel are involved in the search, and more than 200 stress counselors have been assigned to support them during their often grisly work.

"Some of the stuff they're being exposed to is truly horrible," said Mary Anne Murphy, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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