Hopes Pinned On 2nd Black Box
After five days of searching, the ocean is beginning to yield its secrets, CBS News Correspondent Jeffrey Kofman reports.
In water 200 feet deep, five miles off of Peggy's Cove, Navy divers have now located the second of Swissair Flight 111's black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder.
The first of the black boxes, the flight data recorder, is now in Ottawa at the laboratories of the Canadian Safety Board. It was examined earlier Monday, but it contains no data after the time the plane fell below 10,000 feet.
At Peggy's Cove, meanwhile, the military and the media are almost gone, but the memorials continue. And families of victims are still coming. Abe Klein's father, Stanley, was on that flight heading from his home in Queens, N.Y. to Geneva for a business meeting.
"We went through shock," said Cheryl Klein, Abe's wife. "Now we are angry."
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"I am at a stage where I want to know," Abe said. "I really believe that was an accident."
"But things could have been avoided," added Cheryl. "We think he had time to land."
That is the key question here: Did the pilot make the right decision when he chose to circle over the ocean and dump fuel rather than land a very heavy aircraft immediately?
With some important information missing from the data recorder, it is not clear whether that question will ever be answered.