The cockpit voice recorder recovered from American Airlines Flight 587 captured the sound of the plane loudly rattling twice before the pilots lost control after taking off from New York, investigators said last night.
They are still trying to establish the cause of the crash that killed up to 265 people on Monday.
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Evidence from the plane, the voice recorder recovered along with the flight data recorder, and the crash site near John F Kennedy International Airport initially yielded no signs of internal engine failure or a criminal act, said officials with the National Transportation Safety Board.
But, said NTSB investigator Mr George Black at a late afternoon news conference, "We're not ruling anything out at this point."
The plane, bound for Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic split apart and crashed nose first about two minutes after take-off, setting fire to a dozen homes in the working-class seaside neighborhood of Rockaway in Queens.
The inferno killed 251 passengers, nine crew members and at least five people on the ground. Four more people on the ground were reported missing.
Listening to the cockpit voice recorder, the rattling of the frame of the Airbus A300-600 can be heard 107 seconds after the pilots powered up the engines and again 14 seconds later, Mr Black said. Midway between the two rattling sounds, the captain can be heard remarking that he was encountering the wake of a plane ahead of him, he said.
After the second rattling, the co-pilot can be heard asking for maximum power. Then there are "several comments suggesting a loss of control" of the plane. Asked how loud the rattling was, Mr Black said, "It was significant enough for them to make note of it."
Investigators have been looking very closely at the two General Electric CF680C2 series engines. One engine landed at a gas station, 700 feet from the main wreckage while the other fell four blocks from the first and roughly 800 feet from the crater made by the fuselage.
The flight data recorder, which is being analyzed in Washington, should give investigators valuable insight into the performance of engines and flight systems.