SouthShoreNow.ca

Lisa Brown
Lighthouse staff

 COUNTY - Recovery operations to retrieve the wreckage from Swissair Flight 111 still buried under 60 metres of Atlantic Ocean are currently on hold.

 Investigators have pulled 88 per cent of the downed passenger jet from the waters of St. Margarets Bay, but they are at a stalemate as to how to access the remaining pieces scattered on the ocean floor. Having scanned the bottom and determined where pockets of debris remain, they are now considering options to get at it.

 "We know where some concentrations are. We will be going back to them. What we'll be using to go down and get them has not been finalized," Transportation Safety Board spokesman Jim Harris said Monday.

 Much of the located wreckage is strewn between large rocks. That makes the use of the Lunenburg scallop dragger Anne S. Pierce ineffectual. The rocks are large enough that using remote operated vehicles may also be impossible.

 "We may have to go back to actually doing some live diving," Mr. Harris said.

 Divers were used extensively in the weeks following the September 2 crash which killed all 229 people on board the jet. Mr. Harris said he expects it will be another two to four weeks before any decisions are made about debris retrieval.

 Meanwhile, those working at the Shearwater air base in Dartmouth spent last week sifting through containers of wreckage hoping to discover more pieces valuable to their investigation. They found 1,100 previously-unidentified pieces to use in the reconstruction of the front section of the aircraft. Those bits included pieces of plastic, metal and interior trim from the cockpit, Mr. Harris said.

 "All of that will eventually help us," he said.

 The additional sorting was a task investigators knew from the beginning they'd eventually have to undertake. In the early days of the recovery operation, authorities probing the crash were uncertain of possible causes and consequently what parts of the plane they were most concerned with. Everything was stored in 550 boxes.

 The new exhibits will be added to the reconstruction effort continuing at Shearwater. That tedious process is inching forward, but pieces are so small and often damaged that it is an extremely difficult task.

 "It's not unlike a jigsaw puzzle, but a jigsaw puzzle with millions of pieces and you're missing a lot of them," the TSB spokesman said.

 Officials are concentrating on the front section of the downed MD-11 where they believe a massive power failure stemming from an electrical fire may have occurred shortly before the crash. To date, the investigation has revealed heat damage consistent with a fire in the ceiling area forward and aft of the cockpit bulkhead.

 But investigators have been hampered by the lack of information available from the aircraft's flight recorders. Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder stopped recording about six minutes before impact while the plane was about 10,000 feet in the air.

 The cockpit voice recorder indicated the flight crew had smelled smoke before that, but until 90 seconds before the recorders stopped there was no other indication of difficulty with the aircraft.

 Had the recorders not stopped, much of the reconstruction work now under way might not have been necessary. Investigators are having to rely on traditional methods of investigation.

 That prompted the TSB to issue four aviation safety recommendations last week.