The voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 990 could lead to a breakthrough within days in establishing why the Boeing 767 plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 217 people aboard, investigators said yesterday.
Meanwhile, an EgyptAir captain said yesterday that information from the flight data recorder, recovered last Tuesday, suggested the flight was sabotaged.
The US National Transportation and Safety Board chairman, Mr Jim Hall, told NBC's Meet the Press yesterday: "We're certainly hopeful that within the next two or three days we'll be able to answer a lot of the puzzling questions that information on the flight data recorder has raised in our minds." Mr Hall spoke to other reporters at the Newport Naval Base hours after the navy's robot, Deep Drone, plucked the damaged voice recorder from a pile of jagged wreckage on the ocean floor some 78 metres below the surface.
The Cairo-bound Boeing 767 crashed into the Atlantic about 60 miles off the coast of Nantucket Island on October 31st, just 30 minutes after take-off from John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York.
The recorder was on its way to Washington yesterday where NTSB investigators will dry and clean the tape.
Mr Hall said that depending on the condition of the voice tape, it could answer questions over whether the aircraft's automatic pilot and engines were deliberately turned off.
Mr Hall has asked EgyptAir to supply "someone who knew the pilots, who flew with the pilots" to listen to the 30-minute voice recorder tape and help to not just translate the Arabic, but also interpret the nuances of tone, timbre and tension in the crew's voices.
Investigators posted on their Web site (www.ntsb.gov) diagrams of a Boeing 767-300 ER BA.N cockpit and a graph plotting the doomed flight's roller-coaster ride into the ocean from its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet based on radar tracks and the flight data recorder.
NTSB analysis of the data showed the plane's automatic pilot was turned off and the engines were powered back at the beginning of the steep dive that created weightlessness in the cabin.
During the 40-degree pitch descent, the plane exceeded its approved operating speed of .86 Mach - Mach 1 is the speed of sound or about 700 m.p.h. - and an emergency siren and flashing red light were set off. At times the plane reached .90 Mach.
A split developed in the aircraft's right and left elevators - the control surface that pitches the plane's nose up and down - near the bottom of the 30-second plunge and the engines were manually and intentionally shut off.
In Cairo, the former head of the EgyptAir's committee in charge of accident investigation suggested the flight had been sabotaged.
"[Investigators] have said that the plane's engines were switched off," said Mr Essam Ahmed, former head of EgyptAir's committee in charge of investigating plane accidents. "But if that had happened the plane would have fallen steadily.
"Why should the plane fall in such a manner?" Mr Ahmed asked. "I think that someone managed to place something near the cockpit, which has a toilet behind it," he added, suggesting an explosion may have been responsible for the disaster.
An FBI special agent-in-charge, Mr Barry Mawn, who is heading that agency's role in the inquiry, has 250 agents working on the case and was "very hopeful" the crash's cause would be established.
As experts in Washington review the cockpit voice recording, other NTSB investigators will head to Boeing's Seattle facilities tomorrow with the information already gleaned from the flight data recorder.
There they will feed the information into a flight simulator and try to re-enact Flight 990's final moments.
Mr Hall said that after reviewing the information on both recorders, he would consult the navy and the families of the victims before deciding whether to try to recover the rest of the wreckage and human remains.
The recorder retrieved yesterday is one of two "black boxes" now recovered from the wreckage.
Meanwhile, officials said yesterday they would probably suspend efforts to collect debris because of forecasts that conditions in and around the site were likely to worsen.