Cockpit voice recorder found in wreckage of China Eastern plane

WUZHOU, CHINA » Investigators have found what they believe to be the cockpit voice recorder in the wreckage of a China Eastern flight that crashed in the country’s south with 132 people on board, a Chinese aviation official said Wednesday.

The outer casing of one of the two “black boxes” aboard the plane and its storage component both suffered damage, but the unit is “relatively intact,” Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, told reporters at a briefing.

The recorder will be sent to Beijing for decoding and analysis, Zhu said. How long that will take depends on the degree of damage the unit suffered, he said.

“This will provide important evidence as to the cause of the accident,” he said. Investigators will next “continue to go allout to find the flight data recorder to provide even more comprehensive data support to reconstruct the entire incident,” he said.

Images released earlier by state broadcaster CCTV showed workers placing a bright orange, mud-caked cylinder into a labeled, clear plastic, zip-close bag.

Recovering the socalled black boxes — they are usually painted orange for visibility — is considered key to figuring out what caused the crash. They’re typically located in the tail area, where they’re less likely to be damaged in a crash.

The search for clues into why the jetliner dove suddenly and crashed into a mountain in southern China on Monday afternoon had to be temporarily suspended earlier Wednesday as rain slickened the debris field and filled the red-dirt gash formed by the plane’s fiery impact.

Wallets and identity and bank cards have been found and human remains were also recovered Wednesday, Zheng Xi, head of the fire and rescue service in the Guangxi autonomous region where the plane crashed, told reporters.

“The area is overgrown with weeds and the terrain is steep,” Zheng said.