Word: cockpit
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...women investigating the crash of TWA Flight 800. Rain and strong winds disrupted and eventually interrupted search operations. But on Friday there was a breakthrough. Deep Drone 7200, a remotely operated robot outfitted with cameras that can explore ocean depths without divers, located part of the cockpit, "the nerve center of the aircraft," as Robert Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), described it. Said James Kallstrom, the FBI's lead investigator: "I just think that somewhere in the front of the plane is a clue." Investigators generally believe that if a bomb destroyed Flight...
Amid surging hopes that the cause of the crash would soon be revealed, both boxes--the cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders--were flown immediately to the NTSB lab in Washington, where experts spent much of Thursday in preliminary analysis. The flight-data recorder, which automatically tracks a number of the plane's navigational and mechanical processes, had been partly damaged by salt water, though officials believe much of the encoded information can eventually be salvaged...
...cockpit-voice recorder quickly yielded only a tantalizing enigma: what Francis called a "fraction-of-a-second sound" 111/2 minutes into the flight, followed by silence. This tiny glitch of noise reinforced the notion--privately held by many government officials almost from the beginning--that Flight 800 was brought down by a bomb or even a missile. During a Friday- afternoon news conference, Francis revealed that the NTSB was consulting with investigators of what proved to be bombings of an Air India jet in 1985 and of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland...
...crucial clues are likely to be gleaned from the 747's so-called black boxes (now actually colored bright orange): one that records the cockpit's communications with ground control and another that monitors the plane's vital functions. Given the sudden end of the flight, the second box may provide more useful data. Experts, however, may be able to detect the "signature sounds" of a bomb explosion on the cockpit voice recorder. Last week the sturdily armored recorders were still beneath the sea, but there were indications on Saturday that the steady beeps given off by the black boxes...
...said that the investigation into the crash is closing in on an explanation for the crash: "There is evidence down there that is going to tell us what happened to this aircraft." Analysis of the voice recorder shows that two minutes before TWA flight 800 exploded and crashed, the cockpit crew was casually discussing an erratic fuel flow gauge on the number four engine. Other than that, Francis said, the 747 was operating without any "anomalies." Experts are still analyzing the unidentified noise which abruptly ends the recording. While divers located two of the plane's engines on the ocean...