Black Box Recording to Unlock Mystery of Flight 4U 9525

Investigators have obtained an audio recording that could unlock the mystery of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the Alps killing all 150 people board, it emerged today.

Experts said they had extracted ‘usable data’ from the damaged black box cockpit voice recorder salvaged from the obliterated wreckage of the Airbus A320.

It is hoped the audio will piece together the final moments of the flight which plummetted 32,000ft in eight minutes without any Mayday from the pilots.

One theory that emerged today suggested the plane may have crashed because the windscreen cracked, causing a sudden drop in oxygen levels that rendered the pilots unconscious.

Investigators said voices are audible on the recording, which covered the whole flight ‘from departure to crash’.

But they warned that it could take ‘days, weeks and even months’ before analysts know exactly what it being said or what the noises are.

Remi Jouty, of France’s BEA accident investigation bureau, said at a press conference at Le Bourget, near Paris: ‘There were a few problems trying to decipher the recording, but we succeeded in getting an audio file which has usable sounds and voices.

‘We haven’t fully understood it all yet. I can’t say if the pilots are talking, we’ve only just managed to extract this file.’

The cockpit voice recorder is designed to store two hours of conversation and withstand impacts of as much as 3,400 times the force of gravity.

It could yield clues about whether the crew became incapacitated or were battling a technical malfunction.

The device should also allow investigators to detect automated aural alerts from the plane that would help in reconstructing the sequence of events that led to the plane’s sudden descent.

There was confusion over the status of the second black box flight recorder – one which stores 25 hours of data on the aircraft’s systems.

At an earlier press conference, French President Francois Hollande said the case of the second black box has been found, but not its contents.

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