The evidence mounts By Thomas Gorguissian Nine days after the crash of EgyptAir flight 990, the jet's flight data recorder has been recovered. Forty minutes after being located on Tuesday morning the recorder was recovered by Deep Drone, a search robot, and brought aboard the USS Grapple. It was reported later that the process of extracting data from the recorder had started and hopes are rising of soon finding the voice cockpit recorder. Why the Boeing 767 plunged into the waters off Nantucket is still a mystery.
Clues are few and speculations many.
Investigators are optimistic, though, that the records contained in the blackboxes will reveal just how and why the EgyptAir plane plunged into the ocean, killing all 217 on board. Bad weather, high seas and murky waters had hampered attempts to recover the boxes, lying on the ocean floor, some 270 feet below the surface of the water, apparently amid wreckage from the plane. With the terrain too dangerous for divers, an advanced robot, the Magnum, was lowered into the sea on Monday. NTSB Chairman James Hall, in an attempt to assuage growing public impatience, stressed that it had taken a week to recover the recorders of TWA flight 800 in waters half as deep as those in the EgyptAir case. Hall reaffirmed the determination of the investigative team to solve the mystery.