as you might imagine has sharpened the focus on any corner-cutting when it comes to spending money on other things such as safety. now, as for the wreckage, egyptian investigators have possession of the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the airbus. they are said to be in good condition and ready to be analyzed by experts in cairo. the question as we ve been discussing tonight, what will they say about what brought the plane down. black boxes have come a long way over the years and have unlocked a whole lot of mysteries. however as 360 s randi kaye found out, they do have limitations. reporter: this is the sound of a pilot in trouble. swissair one-11, we have to land immediate. reporter: that was the pilot of swiss air 111 minutes before he crashed into the atlantic ocean in 1988. everyone on board was killed. when crash investigators found the plane s black boxes at the bottom of the ocean, they looked intact, so they were stunned to
detected a heat flash in the vicinity of the metro jet crash at the same time been u.s. intelligent analyst believes a fuel tank or bomb could have caused an explosion on the plane. investigatoring have recovered the plane flight data and cog hit voice recorders. tonight, experts are examining a number of possibilities of the crash. metro jet s deputy director said they ruled out human area reporter and technical problems and the only possible explanation is external impact on the plane. but the head of russia s federal air transportation agency says the claim is premature and isn t based on any real facts. and then there is a local group affiliate with isis that claimed it downed the plane. egypt and russia have dismissed that saying islamic militants in the air don t have the military capability to shoot down a plane flying at that altitude. the u.s. has not ruled out terrorism but intelligence analysts say there is no indication that a surface-to-air missile brought down the plane.
act of terrorism or mechanical malfunction. there is this claim by an isis-linked group that says they shot it down. however, that is seemingly more unlikely. most security analysts don t think that this group had access to sophisticated surface-to-air missiles that could have brought down this airliner. and it was flying about 25,000 feet or so, well above the reach of most surface-to-air missiles. so there s a lot of conflicting ideas and tearies about what happened, but the data voice recorders have been found by the investigators. they re looking at the information. and gretchen, we should know in the next day or two a better sense of what actually happened. okay. so we know that the disintegration field is rather large, and i haute to ask the gruesome question, but have they started to recover have they seen any of the bodies? reporter: yes. so it sounds as if they ve located many of the bodies. it is a fairly gruesome scene the
could walk out of the plane but could no longer walk after the shock wore off. reporter: the plane is destroyed. the scattered pieces give investigators their first clues as to what happened. the engines were forward of the plain wreckage. so they traveled further than the rest of the wreckage. to us it could indicate the engines were producing power. reporter: the engines appear to have been functioning, but not much else is known. trying to decipher what happened, they locate the flight data and cockpit voice recorders. when they download the critical information it reveals a dangerous turn of events on turkish airlines flight 1951. as the aircraft was coming in, air traffic control positioned the aircraft in a manner that caused them to be high. once they did that it required them to do a steep rate of
to take pictures of the site. there was no doubt when those first images came back that that was the aircraft. there were landing gear, the engines and other bits of the aircraft. there were bodies still on the sea floor, which was not something we were prepared for. it s not something that we thought could can ever happen years afterwards there would be human remains on the sea floor. the whole emotional part of this expedition just brought us to a place we d never been to before. reporter: 104 bodies are recovered along with the wreckage. a few weeks later, and nearly two years since the crash, french investigators locate what they have been desperately hoping to find the flight data and cockpit voice recorders. coming up will the