BALTIMORE, Maryland April 7, 2014 - There is bad news to digest if the cockpit voice recorder from the missing Malaysian Airlines Jet is actually recovered. And it is really really bad news: it might not and probably won't contain the final conversations of the cockpit crew. The reason: cockpit voice recorders rewind and record over the previous recording every two to three hours. Almost every crash scenario plays out in 30 minutes. When the plane crashes, the recorder stops.
In the case of missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 - which went missing March 8 with 239 persons on board - the flight apparently continued for seven to eight hours after the event that sent it careening off course and bound for what more and more appears to be a final crash landing in a particularly inhospitable part of the Southern Indian Ocean far from any land area. Unless the even that sent the flight off course was so immense that it somehow mimicked an actual crash landing, the cockpit voice recorder would have continued to operate and record over itself every two to three hours. Thus, the key recording would have been recorded over up to four times.
All of this means that those investigating the flight and its demise may never know what happened to send the flight off course. The odds are that the cockpit voice recorder continued to operate because the event - whether human or mechanical in nature - did not end the flight. In fact, the flight continued in the air for seven to eight hours, with the plane flying at a speed of hundreds of miles an hour throughout those final hours. Was someone alive and conscious during those hours, and if so, were they in the cockpit? The only thing investigators are likely to know is what happened during the last two to three hours .
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