Swissair Flight 111 Crash Investigation: Recovery of Flight Data Recorder Offers Hope for Answers

Investigations into the Swissair Flight 111 crash are gaining momentum with the discovery of the flight data recorder on a rocky stretch of sea bottom, littered with debris and wreckage of the MD-11. The recovery of the "black box" has raised hopes that officials will soon know why the plane crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing all 229 people on board. While the recovery of the flight data recorder is a significant step, questions remain about whether it will have to be repaired before the data can be examined, and whether an electric power failure, suspected to have occurred six minutes before impact, had disabled the device.

Key Takeaways:

• The flight data recorder was recovered in an area about five nautical miles southwest of Peggy's Cove, with three major pieces of the MD-11 found in the wreckage field.
• The remains of the victims are in too many pieces to perform DNA analysis, and some smaller pieces will be frozen until lawyers and ethicists can decide what to do.
• Medical teams are sorting and cataloguing human remains around the clock, processing a backlog.
• Between 150 and 170 families have responded to requests for medical records or given blood samples to be used for DNA testing.
• The captain of the plane, Urs Zimmermann, was hired by Swissair in 1971 and had been a captain since 1987, with 9,300 hours of flying time, including 900 in the MD-11.
• The first officer, Stefan Low, joined Swissair in 1991 and had 2,800 hours of experience, including 220 in the MD-11.
• Weather conditions at the time of the crash were good, with a broken cloud ceiling at 13,000 feet and an overcast ceiling at 24,000 feet.

Statistics:

• No additional remains of the 229 victims were identified beyond the body of a French woman, identified on Friday and taken home.
• The wreckage field is about 2,000 to 4,000 yards east of a broken buoy that searchers originally believed had been sheared off by the plane in the last seconds of its flight.
• The divers' "bottom time" is limited to 6 to 10 minutes, due to the 10 feet visibility in the area.
• Over 300 relatives traveled to Peggy's Cove, one of the nearest points of land to the crash site.

Sources:

• "New York Times" article dated September 5, 1998.
• Associated Press report dated September 4, 1998.
• Press conference by Vic Gerden, Transportation Safety Board chief investigator, September 4, 1998.
• Interview with Dr. John Butt, medical examiner, September 4, 1998.
• Swissair press release dated September 4, 1998.