ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, May 27, 1996 TAG: 9605300023
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
DATELINE: MIAMI
SOURCE: From The Associated Press and The Washington Post
NOTE: Lede
A police sergeant searching the murky waters where ValuJet Flight 592 crashed into the Everglades found the crucial cockpit voice recorder Sunday afternoon.
It contains the last 30 minutes of cockpit conversation and sounds, and may offer vital clues on a fire and the crew's reaction. The DC-9 crashed May 11, killing all 110 people aboard.
The recorder was shipped to the headquarters of the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington for analysis, spokesman Mike Benson said.
``We want to know what happened in the cockpit, the last moment. We are hopeful that the conversation between the pilot and other sound will give us important clues,'' Benson said. The voice recorder was about 100 feet from where the flight data recorder was found May 13.
The plane's flight data recorder contained numerous interruptions of electrical power and no data at all for the last 50 seconds of flight, so safety board technicians are anxious to determine if the voice recorder suffered the same fate or worse.
Even without the voice recorder, investigators involved in one of the toughest recovery efforts in aviation history are dredging up evidence of an intense smoky fire that broke out within minutes of the plane's takeoff.
Preliminary information gleaned from the 35 percent to 40 percent of the DC-9 that has been recovered raises the possibility that some or all of those aboard were dead or incapacitated before impact.
There are indications that conditions were worse in the passenger cabin than in the cockpit. Earlier, investigators said several items from the cockpit showed no smoke or fire damage, including the crew's flight bags and aircraft operating manuals.
NTSB spokesman Greg Feith said, ``We don't know if we're ever going to be able to determine what the passengers were actually going through in the cabin. The CVR may give us that clue because, with the noises and the conversations that are recorded by the flight crew on the cockpit voice recorder, there may have been a phone call or an intercom call from one of the cabin attendants. We may hear some other background noises.''
Speculation about the fire's cause has focused on 119 oxygen canisters in the plane's front cargo hold, which is underneath the cabin. ValuJet was not authorized to carry the canisters, which contain a volatile mix of chemicals used to provide oxygen to passenger emergency masks.
Investigators found the aluminum frame of a passenger seat that was partially melted and heavily damaged by fire, Feith said. He said it would take temperatures of at least 500 degrees to cause that type of damage.
Also found was a blackened support structure and smoke-damaged floor beams from the passenger cabin.
Investigators are using the aircraft debris to reconstruct the forward part of the cargo hold to find the pattern of smoke and fire, which could tell them where the fire began and how it spread.
They also plan to build a cargo hold with oxygen canisters and ignite it to recreate what happened, Feith said.
Investigators also are analyzing a tape of a conversation between the co-pilot and the Miami International Airport tower to determine if the co-pilot was wearing smoke goggles, Feith said.
In the tower's tape, the co-pilot asked for directions to the airport. That could indicate the pilot was flying blind due to smoke in the aircraft, but ``what that means, we don't know,'' Feith said.
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