When two hikers recovered debris from the 1985 crash site of Eastern Airlines Flight 980 in Bolivia last year, including some recording tapes, the find raised hopes that a cause for the 727 crash might finally be identified — but the NTSB said on Tuesday its investigators have determined the materials “do not contain any [useful] data.” Some of the metal parts that were recovered “were consistent with parts related to the flight data recorder pressurized container assembly,” the NTSB said, and one metal piece was identified as a cockpit voice recorder rack. However, the magnetic tapes that were recovered were not from a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder.
The materials provided to the NTSB consisted of several metal fragments, one damaged spool of magnetic tape and two additional off-spool sections of magnetic tape. The magnetic tape on the spool was three-quarter-inch U-Matic videotape, and NTSB staffers found it contained an 18-minute recording of the “Trial by Treehouse” episode of the 1960s TV series “I Spy,” dubbed in Spanish. The tape segments were not the quarter-inch-wide tape that would have been used in a CVR or FDR at the time. The materials were examined in the NTSB’s recorder laboratory at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., following a request by the General Directorate of Civil Aviation of Bolivia.
