It was expected to arrive in Washington at noon Sunday. EgyptAir officials will be helping NTSB investigators interpret the information, Hall said. An EgyptAir official has said the cockpit voice recorder had a 30-minute tape. While not the two-hour digital models recommended by the NTSB, the tape should have lasted long enough to record conversations as the plane climbed 33,000 feet and then began to plummet to the sea about 40 minutes after the flight from New York to Cairo took off. The flight data recorder, which was retrieved on Tuesday, and the cockpit voice recorder could tell investigators what doomed the Boeing 767, which crashed Oct. 31 in the ocean off the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard.
Investigators continue to focus on all possible causes for the crash, including mechanical problems.
Officials say they are not leaning toward any specific theory. NTSB officials said investigators will travel to Seattle this week to use a Boeing 767 flight simulator. NTSB investigator Greg Phillips said information from the flight data recorder would be entered into the simulator to study how the airplane would react. As for the search for wreckage, Hall said he would talk to Navy officials on Sunday about how to proceed with the recovery operation. The cockpit voice recorder was found a day before weather conditions were expected to deteriorate.