Searchers combing blackened rubble at the Pentagon yesterday found the key electronic flight data and voice recorders -- the so-called "black boxes" -- from a hijacked jetliner that hit the massive building, a defense official said.
"The flight data and voice data boxes were recovered at approximately 4am and are in the possession of the FBI," Pentagon official Bryan Whitman said.
He said the recorders were at a National Transportation Safety Board laboratory in Washington, where the board was giving technical assistance in reading the data information.
The boxes could be instrumental in getting information about the brief flight of an American Airlines jetliner that was commandeered by hijackers after it left nearby Dulles International Airport en route to Los Angeles on Tuesday.
It crashed into US military headquarters with 64 passengers and crew on board. More than 100 people on the ground were missing.
The voice box electronically records cockpit conversations and the data recorder keeps track of speed, altitude and other information on the aircraft flight.
The jetliner was one of four commercial passenger planes hijacked at virtually the same time. Two others crashed into New York's World Trade Center, demolishing it, and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.
Only the data recorder has been found from the Pennsylvania crash site.
Both the flight data and voice recorders are missing from the other two planes.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that 250 people may be dead after a hijacked airliner slammed into the Pentagon, including the 64 people aboard the commandeered flight.
The highest-ranking victim appears to have been a three-star general who was the Army's personnel chief, a defense official said.
The Navy said its operations center -- likely to play a key role in any US military response to what President George W. Bush has called "acts of war" against the United States -- had been damaged in the crash.
"We have reestablished our operation center, and it is functioning," Admiral Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, told a Pentagon briefing.
He declined to say whether it was still housed in the Pentagon or had been moved elsewhere.
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