Noise heard on cockpit audio of crashed Russian plane

Aljazeera

The cockpit voice recorder of the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai Peninsula has been deciphered and “a noise” was heard in the last second of the recording, Egyptian investigators said.

“A spectral analysis will be carried out by specialised labs in order to identify the nature of this sound,” Ayman al-Mokadem, the head of the accident investigation committee, said in Cairo on Saturday.

British and US officials, including the leaders of both countries, have suggested that the crash of Metrojet flight 9268 on October 31 – which killed all 224 people on board – was possibly caused by a bomb aboard the plane.

Russian and Egyptian authorities have been hesitant to endorse any theory ahead of official results from an ongoing investigation.

The Egyptian committee was still “in the information gathering phase,” he said, adding that “all possibilities” were being considered, referring to the cause of the crash.

Bad weather had prevented visits to the crash site since Wednesday, but plans were in place to bring the wreckage to Cairo as soon as possible for detailed examination with the assistance of metallurgy specialists.

The scattering of the debris “over a wide area more than 13 kilometres in length” was consistent with an in flight break-up, al-Mokadem said, but initial findings did not yet allow authorities to identify the cause.