Paris: French investigators yesterday recovered the cockpit voice recorder from an Air France flight that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean almost two years ago, killing all 228 people on board.
The machine that records cockpit conversations was located on Monday and raised from the ocean depths yesterday, according to the BEA (Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la sécurité de l'aviation civile), the French agency that probes air accidents.
The plane's flight data recorder was pulled out on Sunday, meaning both pieces critical to determining the cause of the June 1, 2009, crash have now been found. The memory unit was found by a submarine probing 12,800 feet below the ocean's surface.
Thunderstorm
Experts have said without the two recorders there would be almost no chance of determining what caused the worst disaster in Air France's history. Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris slammed into the Atlantic northeast of Brazil after running into an intense high-altitude thunderstorm.
"If the black boxes are readable, in three weeks we can hope to know part of the truth," Transport Minister Thierry Mariani said.
BEA chief Jean-Paul Troadec said that the two pieces of equipment could allow experts to piece together technical occurrences and the crew's reaction.
He said that other aircraft debris, possibly including the cockpit, would be raised from the ocean floor for study, to further shed light on what went wrong.
The condition of the instruments was not immediately clear.
BEA officials have warned that the recordings may yet prove unusable, considering the pressure they were subjected to for nearly two years at such ocean depths.
Automatic messages sent by the Airbus 330's computers showed the aircraft was receiving false air speed readings from sensors known as pitot tubes.
