Russian searchers on Monday recovered the cockpit voice recorder from an Armenian passenger jet that crashed in the Black Sea nearly three weeks ago, killing all 113 people aboard, the transport minister said.
Workers using a remote-controlled diving apparatus with a robotic arm plucked the recorder from the sea floor nearly 1,640 feet beneath the surface after removing a layer of silt up to 1 1/2 feet thick that had hidden it from searchers for days, he said.
Transport Minister Igor Levitin told a news conference that authorities hope to soon recover the flight data recorder, which they believe is under silt 10-15 feet away.
Officials hope the recorders will help determine the cause of the May 3 crash of the Armavia Airbus A-320, which plunged into the sea in heavy rain and poor visibility as it approached the airport on a flight from the Armenian capital, Yerevan, to the Russian resort city of Sochi.
"I think that what happened would be revealed," said Tatyana Anodina, head of the Interstate Aviation Committee, the civil agency that links Russia with 11 other former Soviet republics.
Anodina said the cockpit voice recorder was damaged by the crash and may have suffered from the harsh conditions beneath the silt, but she expressed confidence that it would yield information "very important to investigators" - a recording of the voices and other sounds in the cockpit in the final minutes of the doomed flight.
The Interstate Aviation Committee will seek to coax the sound out of the box, working with French investigators and Armenian representatives, Anodina said. She said it was unclear when they might have results.
Prosecutors almost immediately dismissed the possibility that terrorists brought the plane down, and officials point to rough weather or pilot error as the likely cause, but Armavia officials have suggested air traffic controllers are at least partly to blame.
Anodina called the recovery operation "one of the most difficult" worldwide.
A device normally used for geological research was brought in last week for the search, but the operation was stymied by bad weather until Friday, Levitin said. When the weather cleared, the device first combed a 65-foot-by-65-foot patch of the sea floor amid the wreckage near the coast, where French specialists had detected signals from the recorders.
The search area was widened after the recorders were not found, but the voice recorder was finally located late Sunday under silt in the initial search area after searchers attached a radio-signal detection device to the apparatus, Levitin said.
The Interfax news agency, citing an unidentified official of the search operation in Sochi, reported shortly after the news conference Monday that the second recorder had been located. Levitin had said searchers would begin looking for it overnight.
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