Mon, Jun 24, 2002 page2

• `Black box' picks up strange noises

  VOICE RECORDER While investigators know that something unusual took place before the China Airlines flight went down, they don't yet have enough information to speculate on the cause of the crash

  • By Chang Yu-jung / STAFF REPORTER
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  The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) picked up three "unusual sounds" before the ill-fated China Airlines CI611 passenger jet crashed into sea with 225 people on board , Kay Yong (戎凱), director of the Cabinet's Aviation Safety Council (ASC, 飛安會), said yesterday.

  According to Yong, shortly before the crash, the CVR recorded unusual noises that sounded like "ta-ta, ka-ta, ta-ta" and noises that sounded like a heartbeat. Then, after a loud thud at 3:28pm, the time when the airliner disappeared on the radar, the CVR lost power.

  

  Aviation Safety Council director Kay Yong and other officials are seen through the frame of one of China Airlines' flight CI611's ``black boxes'' at a press conference yesterday.

  PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES

  The CVR, one of the two black boxes, recorded sounds made in the cockpit during the last 31 minutes and 52 seconds before the airliner broke up in midair and crashed into the sea en route to Hong Kong on May 25.

  "So far, we [investigators] cannot identify these sounds as sounds normally heard in a cockpit during operation," Yong said.

  He also mentioned that five minutes after the plane took off, the CVR suddenly failed to pick up any sound for a third of a second.

  "When the CVR started recording again, we found that the environmental noise had been reduced somehow," Yong said.

  According to the CVR recording, the pilots' exchanges were normal throughout the flight and none of them mentioned hearing any unusual sounds, Yong said.

  ASC yesterday released preliminary findings of the CVR recording at a press conference.

  However, the investigation team had no explanation for the cause of the abnormal sounds and refused to speculate.

  The US Federal Aviation Administration, US National Transportation Safety Board, the ASC, China Airlines and seven pilots from Boeing all worked on the analysis of the recording.

  Yong said the recording still needed to undergo a thorough analysis. The recording will also be compared with data from the radar and the flight data recorder (FDR).

  The FDR is the other "black box," which is designed to record data from the plane's technical systems. ASC will give a report on the initial FDR findings tomorrow.

  Yong also said that confidential information from the investigation had been leaked to the local media over the past few days.

  "This is something I would never allow," Yong said.

  "If someone from the ASC leaked the information, I, as the director of the council, will resign right away. However, if the information was released by other non-ASC investigators, I would ask them to leave the team," he said, warning that he might take legal action against those who continue to leak information to the press.
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