By Xinhua
Nairobi : A Kenyan search team in Cameroon has retrieved the cockpit voice recorder of the Kenya Airways plane that crashed in a mangrove swamp last month, airline officials said Saturday.
A statement from Kenya Airways said the voice recorder was recovered from the crash site Friday and arrangements are underway to transfer it to Canada, where the data recorder of the plane is already being examined.
Officials hope the voice recorder may shed light on the cause of the crash of the Boeing 737-800 that killed all 114 people from at least 26 nations on board on May 5. Fifteen Indians were among those who died in the crash.
The plane came down shortly after taking off in heavy rain from the Cameroon commercial town of Douala en route to Kenyan capital Nairobi.
Flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders, also known as black boxes, contain a wide variety of information, including speed and altitude as well as cockpit voice communications.
A report released Monday also said the Kenya Airways jetliner reached 3,000 feet before nose-diving sharply at a 45-degree angle "for undetermined reasons." The plane disintegrated on impact.
Though the flight was delayed about an hour because of thunderstorms and heavy rain, the report suggested that conditions had cleared by the time the flight took off.
However, pilots from two other airlines said they waited longer to take off because they were concerned about the weather.
The Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority said a full report of what led to the May 5 crash will take as long as a year.