Brazil's firemen on Saturday found the black box
containing the pilots' voice recording in the wreckage of the TAM airlines plane
that crashed in Sao Paulo last Tuesday, Brazil's Air Force said Saturday.
Firefighters try to extinguish a fire
at the site where a TAM airlines commercial jet crashed in Sao Paulo,
Tuesday, July 17, 2007. The plane with 176 people aboard crashed and burst
into flames in Sao Paulo after skidding off a runway that has been
criticized as being too short in a driving rain, the nation's airport
authority said. [AP]
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Brazilian authorities had already sent what they thought were the flight's
two black boxes to Washington for analysis. But a statement from the Air Force
said one of them turned out to be a simple tape recorder and not the flight
voice recorder.
The error was due to major damage sustained by the equipment as a result of
the crash and subsequent fire, it said.
The July 17 crash was the deadliest in Brazil's aviation
history, when a TAM airlines Airbus A320 crashed into a fuel station and
exploded on landing at the Congonhas airport, killing nearly 200 people,
including 187 aboard and at least four others on the ground.